Free Thought Lives

Truth and Disfavored Identities

In public discourse, an opponent’s identity and experience can matter more than their arguments. For instance, if you are a philosopher who supports the use of torture in a narrow set of circumstances on utilitarian grounds, you would not want to find yourself debating the ethics of such a position with a victim of torture. The optics of such a debate would be horrible, and in the minds of many observers they would place the philosopher at a decisive disadvantage no matter how careful or well defended his arguments happened to be. In the same way, whole groups of people consigned to the bottom of the identity politics grievance hierarchy are saddled with a similar handicap, often in situations far less contentious than the debate over torture.

On Saturday in Washington DC, a group of Catholic school kids fell victim to this presumptive logic. The progressive media ran with a story that confirmed their intersectional priors and, in the process, damaged their credibility, established an unsustainable precedent, and unwittingly affirmed President Trump’s demagogic “Fake News” mantra.

The boys responded by mocking him and yelling “Build the wall!” while one of their number smirked into Phillips’s face, an act of effrontery that apparently reflects the entitlement and racism of white Americans, the moral arrogance of Trump supporters, the malevolence of privileged high school bullies like Brett Kavanaugh, and so on and so forth.

Footage has since emerged that provides a fuller picture of the incident, and it now appears that this narrative is almost entirely untrue. It seems that it was Phillips who approached the boys, beating his drum while they were minding their own business, chanting their high school cheer, and awaiting instructions from their chaperone. In everyvideo of the incident that I have watched, the boys’ behaviour is arguably rowdy and insensitive, but I have yet to see any evidence that supports the far more egregious charge of racism. That is, unless we are prepared to accept that any confrontation between a Native American and a white youth is ipso facto racist, no matter who instigated it or why. Even then, the specific accusations made about the boys’ behavior seem to be false.

We now have a 2 hour raw recording of the MAGA kids incident.

We can see

No chanting "build the wall" as far as I sawNative group approaches about an hour after the kids were already there"Black Activists" are Black Hebrew Israelites yelling Fagg**https://t.co/WmHAmsYOH8

Prior to their confrontation with Phillips, the boys were arguing with a small group of Black Israelites (described in the initial media reports simply as “black activists”), who aggressively disparaged the boys’ “whiteness,” yelled homophobic slurs, and racially abused a black student. Unsurprisingly, the boys took exception to all this. But even though the video footage now corroborates the (truthful) account that the boys gave to the media in the wake of this incident, the Diocese has apologized and some of the boys now face expulsion.

On social media, an outpouring of righteous hatred was emptied over these young men, and Twitter was awash with calls for them to be assaulted or “doxxed” in the name of historical atonement and multicultural tolerance.

This disgraceful affair is further evidence of America’s spiralling polarization and of group hatreds being used to justify sanctimonious mobbing and violence. Activists and Twitter blowhards, some of them with thousands of followers, have run roughshod over the facts with a false narrative of grotesque privilege colliding with noble oppression that confirmed their ideological preferences. Their idle (and possibly cynical) demonization of schoolchildren was then amplified by click-hungry media sites trafficking in furious indignation and recklessly stoking sectarian anger. That Phillips played his own part in encouraging a misleading version of events does not excuse the failure to verify on the part of those uncritically reporting and circulating his remarks.

As white and wealthy Christian young men confronted by an ageing person of color, the schoolboys were placed at an immediate disadvantage on a number of identitiarian fronts, so that it was evidently felt that their point of view could be presumptively and legitimately disregarded. So entrenched have such assumptions become in the nation’s finest progressive minds, that supposedly serious news outlets splashed headlines across their websites like “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” with scant consideration for quaint notions like fairness or accuracy. And as a result of sunk costs and the incentive to save face, the odds of retractions—even in the face of compelling evidence—are slim.

This sad affair has allowed political charlatans, axe-grinders, and race baiters to wax poetic and connect the incident to their own personal bugaboos, be they experiences at the hands of high school bullies or racist white cisheteropatriarchy. Weaving comprehensive narratives about society from isolated cases (even cases in which the facts militate against those narratives) and engaging in moral preening targeted at entire identity groups is always dangerous. But in our current climate, it is deemed acceptable even so, so long as the objects of hatred hail from disfavored backgrounds.

The unfortunate fate that the boys encountered and the Orwellian dishonesty and public Two Minutes Hate that followed hew to a broader and increasingly familiar trend of exacting revenge on historically privileged groups for the secularized original sin imputed to their unalterable characteristics, without regard for truth, consequences, or even simple human decency. Whether it be the paucity of evidence corroborating the Kavanaugh allegations or the miscarriages of justice handed down by Title IX kangaroo courts, vindictive tribalism is being allowed to determine individual and institutional actions. Regardless of one’s political orientation, we will all suffer if this vengeful distortion of reality is allowed to get any further out of hand. A course correction that returns to a sober assessment of the facts before rushing to judgment is long overdue.

Max Hyams is an undergraduate at Philosophy and Political Science Major at Binghamton University. You can follow him on Twitter @Mxjhymz1

Of course, the same can be said of the entire right, and unlike the left, the right has real political power right now. Or, maybe we could drop the whole ‘left\right’ thing and just consider actions outside of their identity groups?

Citizen of Reality, good point, this has been occurring to me lately… aren’t we falling into the identitarian game when we use the ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels? Maybe it’s better to avoid pigeonholing people into identity boxes altogether.

@Citizens of Reality, I disagree with generalising to the point of not having any meaningful qualifiers. Unlike race and gender, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian are reflective of real differences.

I agree the right should focus less on the outrages of the left, but that will require those new media outlets to grow to the point they can do their own original journalism, to rival the NYT and WaPo. Hope you’re doing your part by subscribing!

Stephanie, If the right and classical liberals stop focusing on the outrages of the left, will that lead to fewer outrages from the left or more?
Unlike Citizen of Reality, I do not see the right having much power, politically or otherwise. When virtually the entire culture: media, academia, Hollywood, tech giants, non-tech giant corps like P&G (Gillette), all government bureaucracies, and Pre-school thru 12, is in the tight control of an intolerant leftist orthodoxy, does anyone think Donald Trump will be anything more than a blip on the radar screen?
If the right had any power perhaps news stories such as this one would rarely take place. Instead these stories are the norm.
I would suggest if those of us of classical liberal or conservative bent reduce our focus on the gorilla in the room, we will no longer be in the room.

I like how you take two very liberal papers as your example of good news reporting. The WasPot jumped in on the action with their own condemnations of this affair. They have a history or articles written by far left and Racists writers. Examples of this was an article which criticized the one DCs council members who happened to be white. The article said something like this “He is white with a white wife and even his dog is white” . Yep that made it through the so called journalistic filters who are now SJW. They also won a Pulitzer for an article about the suffering of the metal patients at the hands of the DC government. While everyone was cheering their success they forgot to mention that the WasPot was instrumental in getting the crack smoking prostitute chasing mayor elected three times which led to the disaster in the first place. Kinda like winning a photo prize for an accident caused by the photographer shoving a baby carriage into the street initiating the accident in the first place. Most of the media has been taken over by the social justice warrior crowd so anything they say is tainted with bias and deception. IMO media is a cheap prostitute who will also beat the drums for war the next time the country wants one.
The media is also responsible for causing violence and deaths. A great example is the Rodney King incident. Yep he was beaten and brutally and most people will agree that that was wrong. But then later when you see the whole video which showed that after a 120 MPH chase Mr. King was under arrest on the ground not being harassed. Then Mr. King jumped up and attacked the officer which anyone raised in a rough neighborhood would know that your asking to be severely beaten. Most police forces will never tolerate being attacked since they know they will lose respect and control. Well the media had a field day with oppression victimization and racism, all one sided of course. The results were people dead all over the country and businesses burned. Not justifying the police but many people would be less enraged if the whole story/story was shown.

It’s almost as though the ideology on the right is “we’re not the left!” and on the left, it’s “we’re not the right!” and both sides are trying so hard to NOT be the other side that they’re becoming homogeneous and with no inherent purpose.

Please inform us of some current instances where the political right behaved so badly and was exempted from scrutiny by a credulous and approving media which amplified and disseminated the lies promulgated by a group of lying rightist.

Check your vision. It is clear that your passport reads “Citizen of Unreality”. Real political power…like having lefty vile hacks trot out the “white privilege” lie for every false charge, from Tawana Brawley to Duke Lacross, to the forged docs on President GW Bush, to the “Trump is a spy” delusion to the slander of Kavanaugh.
There is a clear pattern: lies against one group.

Um, gerrymandering congressional and state districts since the 90’s, overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican Party, would indicate a good amount of political power. Unless I’m missing something and both bodies are no longer the foremost domain of politics?

show a right version of antifa
show politicians speaking like maxine waters or the mohammedan’s elected to the house
there are indeed idiots on all sides of all arguments
the left is more vile and dangerous

I think that is what the article is about. If the truth doesn’t matter then there is no justice. There are so many good reasons to look at the truth and come to a reasonable conclusion. However even the truth in a situation like this is not available to some. What’s the story?

Surely a better source of blame isn’t the Media, but those who own the media and their cultural values. Specifically who owns CNN – from which cultural background do the majority of its employees and managers come from?

Surely the critique of blame should be specifically levied at the Culture behind the lie, as opposed to all encompassing ‘media’. Blaming the ‘media’ is like blaming guns – look to the culture of those who inflict the violence. With gun crime the majority users and victims of guns are the black and Hispanic culture…. which culture overwhelmingly controls our media? That is where the blame for these sort of propaganda episodes should be levied at.

This is where the real crime lies, the manufactured optics by CNN and other large news organisations – this is the fake news that amounts to little more than cultural propaganda. Further more, the repeated incidence of these sort of events, is suggestive that is is more than just a one of mistake, the reoccurring pattern suggests that it is in fact outright cultural warfare by the owners of these media companies, being waged on the population groups that in the main were responsible for both founding the societies these very same organisations are seeking shelter with.

These optics are being manufactured for one purpose and one purpose only – to disenfranchise a large segment of the population from having any moral authority over how our nations should be run.

It is cultural warfare and it is being waged by CNN and the big media 5 media companies, and more specifically those who own and control them.

This is so true. When it comes down to it, the media is a group of corporations which often operate in ways which are indistinguishable from autocracy. It is important to also note that the primary motivator for any sort of press is ultimately user engagement and hitherto cold hard cash. By running such stories and carefully choosing the context within which they are reported, more users click on the title. It’s quite sad that our modern world is one of such rampant sensationalism.

Let me guess “those who own and control them” are some cabal consisting of George Soros, the Bilderberg Group, the Clinton Foundation, the Washington Post/NYT, the UN/IMF/World Bank, Hollywood, the University system, Davos, the IPCC, NYC, LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and last but not least, because the paranoid, delusional list of boogeymen would be incomplete without them – the Jewish people??? Tell me I’m wrong. A lot of YouTube scholars out here posting some wild shit. You’re point/argument is not only incoherent but your syntax is so poor that I’m not entirely sure you’re not an Eastern European troll of some sort in the employ of some autocratic regime. Anyway, have a good day.

lemme see…smug white kid defends native americans from angry black men as prep school buddies join in tomahawk chant behind him in support of his courage for doing the right thing. Is this your narrative now?

Did you even make the slightest effort to understand the context of the whole situation? Pro tip: there is a video out there which is almost 2 hours long.

What I saw was a bunch of teenagers acting more like adults and adults acting more like teenagers. I don’t have kids, but had any of them been one of mine, I would have been quite proud of the restraint they showed in the face of significant abuse (again the tip here is that I am not talking about Mr Phillips).

Ok, but you also should realize that if you racially reverse the situation and have a group of adult WHITE supremacists telling, “Incest babies” “Go back to Africa”, and “Faggots!” at Black parochial school kids, then what you are calling”mundane” becomes instead the first three signs of the Apocalypse rolled into one, and it’s all we’d be talking about for the next year, at least. As it is, the Black Israelites are barely worth a mention, even when the mainstream delivers its revised version. So there’s that.

Macbeth is looking more and more relevant.
“I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d.”

I highly recommend reading evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin’s work. Based on statistical analysis, he predicted back in 2010 that America would see a major spike in political violence in the 2020s (and obviously this will not be confined to America). He also has found that intragroup cohesion and cooperation is the most important factor in the rise and fall of societies.

While billionaire globalists like the Koch brothers and George Soros push rapid mass immigration into Western countries (with zero appeals for any cultural integration), and while cartels of multinational corporations jump onto the incredibly divisive Intersectional bandwagon, watch how quickly Western nations fall into violent schism.

An important question: are Western oligarchs really this stupid, or is the very plan to produce the destabilization of Western society in order to lay the ground for their grand new social experiment?

That’s what Mao did. He directed his most radical followers, who were primarily young students, to violently attack the older traditions of Chinese society in order to clear the path for his personal experiment.

I believe that is what’s going on. It doesn’t work without ignorant and highly emotional fellow travelers. Did you read Walter Williams essay about the politics of immigration? He reminded people about Cesar Chavez who led groups of field workers to the desert to beat up incoming illegals who would take their jobs for less money. I had forgotten all about Chavez. My how times have changed. The illegal immigrant arguements sound eerily similar to the pro slavery ones.

What better way to control than to divide and conquer using identity politics?

The left used to understand that mass immigration lowered wages and especially hurt the working class. This was considered an obvious and banal economic truth. Cesar Chavez was well aware of it. The Capitalists of the gilded age used mass immigration to break union strikes. Inequality grew
profoundly as a consequence of so much growth in the labor supply.

The West is currently importing large numbers of unskilled workers. Western elites understand well that there aren’t many remaining jobs available for current unskilled citizens, as their bipartisan economic policies have already shipped those jobs overseas. They are counting on automation to eliminate the rest.

So what are they doing? Sure, the “left wing” parties perceive new immigrants as likely future voters for them, as their general economic policy is to promise free shit that will be paid by other people’s grandchildren. But the “right wing” party (Republicans) has also been been very favorable to increased immigration, and that goes right through Reagan, Bush, and certainly is a major plank in the Koch brothers agenda. Further, key think tanks and policy forming organs, the types that are funded by the oligarchs, craft and push policies onto the bribed political elites themselves.

Even in the UK, the only party talking about significantly restricting immigration (UKIP) also just happens to be the party targetted by a financial blacklisting and deplatforming campaign conducted by the financial and tech industries (witness the treatment of rising UKIP voices Carl Benjamin, Tommy Robinson, and Count Dankula).

The left also talks about universal health care, free education, universal basic income, expanding the social safety net, etc. How this could possibly work with increasingly porous borders is obvious. It can’t. It’s fantasy and sheer intellectual bankruptcy.

We are now witnessing in real time the coalescence of the new Woke left and concentrated corporate power (and the billionaire majority shareholders- the Davos set) to clamp down on any dissent from the globalist neoliberal agenda. The globalists love Identity politics. Much easier to rule a divided population, plus it gives them a handy rationalization to not feel bad about themselves for how they f—-ed over the native working classes. Those dummies were just bigots anyway.

Nike, Gillette, Google, YouTube, MasterCard, Twitter, Facebook, the new Pravda of CNN, the New York Times, the BBC, all are circling the wagons around the official narrative, or the Gated Institutional Narrative, as Eric Weinstein calls it.

What will happen to the Western middle and lower middle classes, where everyone is encouraged to live in separate cultural and moral silos, under governments that increasingly exhibit financial and structural weakness?

Excellent analysis, although given the more common false equivalency allowed to Foxesque BS, it’s sad the author did not give even at least a fleeting example of this real equivalency in the equally polar and egregious (at the least) counter narrative of “rapists” and “bad hombres.” Sadly this piece can now be carried forward as a banner for the alt right and be discredited by the hard left.

@Nesdon, this piece, in not calling for the kids’ head, was always going to be immediately discredited by the left of all kinds. Your desire for the author to dredge up some uttering of Trump’s even though it is not comparable is classic TDS, and exactly the sort of false equivalency that has obscured the rise of a very dangerous movement on the left.

When was the last time someone on the left was falsely portrayed as having behaved badly, and a chorus of voices rose up demanding violence be done upon them, even after it was all shown to be a hoax? Recent objects of hate on the right include the parents of “Drag Kid,” who are legitimately and openly committing child abuse by having their child perform at strip clubs for money, and there is still no one of repute talking about beating them up.

“……..When was the last time someone on the left was falsely portrayed as having behaved badly…..?”

Firing of Shirley Sherrod, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On July 19, 2010, Shirley Sherrod was fired from her appointed position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture. Her firing was an administration reaction to media reports on video excerpts from her address to an event of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in March 2010 and commentary posted by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart on his website. Based on these excerpts, the NAACP condemned Sherrod’s remarks as racist and US government officials called on the official to resign. However, review of her full speech showed that the excerpts had been selectively edited, and that her remarks – understood in context – were about the importance of overcoming personal prejudices. The NAACP and White House officials then apologized for their earlier criticisms, and United States Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack apologized for the firing …..

……In 2011, Sherrod filed suit against Breitbart and co-defendant Larry O’Connor for defamation. In 2015, following lengthy pretrial proceedings, and efforts by Breitbart to have the suit dismissed which were rejected, the parties settled the suit on undisclosed terms…..

@Jack, I’lI allow it, although what I was asking specifically about was the piling on of prominent right-wing people frothing at the mouth and ready for violence over anything, let alone something untrue. But if this happened in 2010, I think that says it all. The left runs at about, what, 2/week?

‘……..On August 12, Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist from Charlottesville, was walking with a group of counterprotesters away from Emancipation Park, where the hate groups were rallying. That’s when a high-speed car, driven by right-wing extremist James Alex Field Jr., plowed into the counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

“I was there when the attack happened,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian. “Despite the president deeming me — a transgender woman — unfit for military service, I ran toward the attacker with a weapon. I was ready to engage him if he tried to hurt more people.”

On August 17, NSJW posted a link to Gorcenski’s page on a website dedicated to discussing how best to troll victims (the website was not Pony Power), and said “Gorcenski was at the Cville rally, the torch march the night before as well.”

Twenty minutes later, the user “SleepingInRlyeh,” wrote, “Found Gorcenski’s power word (pre-tranny name).” And 15 minutes after that, he posted her home address, links to her website and social media profiles, and a photograph.

Gorcenski told me that she’s been dealing with harassment since well before the “Unite the Right” rally. In March or April, she says that users on the aforementioned website dedicated to trolling discovered the name she went by before Emily, and she sent me a screenshot of transphobic harassment on Twitter from July.

“As far as being a target goes, it sucks,” she told me. “These folks are evidently dangerous, as seen from the events of August 11 and 12. … At the same time, I am accustomed to online harassment and the more energy they pour into me, the less they spend on other folks.”……..’

@Jack, I didn’t follow that whole debacle much, but I did watch the video of the car attack and it could not be described as “high-speed.” I don’t know the details of the case but the characterisation of it as such despite the video evidence is sketchy.

Back to the question at hand, you are further proving my point by going back a year and a half and citing someone who doesn’t even use their real name on Twitter. I absolutely do not dispute there are shitty people on the right, but that obvious fact doesn’t even merit mentioning it’s so pedantic. The right is quite good at purging anyone of prominence who goes too far (like Steven King this week, although the Democrats blocked his censure). What is relevant are the people who are actually relevant: media, political, and cultural thought-leaders, and what they can repeatedly say without being held accountable by their own side.

I understand the urge to be “fair,” but being truly fair means having a single standard of conduct and applying it equally, not straining to make a case that both sides of an issue are equally bad.

So a racist sued and out lawyered a small poorly funded media outlet.
Meanwhile, the lives of the Duke Lacrosse team, numerous politicians, actors, radio and TV personalities, judges, are all either damaged or destroyed by the left’s false narratives (lies).
The reactionary mob is at the point of no return:
Openly encouraging violence against children.
Have you no shame?

Our mutual enemy is not the left or the right but the corrupt oligarchy that seeks to consolidate its hold on all the world’s power and wealth by manipulating the masses with manipulative, click-bait ‘news.’

Yes, there is an Oligarchy of international scope and their flunkies are running major media.
Orson Welles would be flabbergasted at the low hanging fruit desperate for a “Citizen Kane” treatment.
How is it that the Amazon Times, just to name one example, is considered a serious newspaper?
Twitter is Orwellian enough to be considered a high tech “daily hate”.
And let’s finally confront the privatization of censorship by FB, Google, Twitter etc.

@James Lee @Lydia
So well said James, I too remember when the left were for workers, today they are for young welfare recipients (never old age pensioners) imported multiculturals and ever increasing fringe identity groups.

Of course the elites know the consequences of their actions when Rome fell the barbarians (economic /welfare migrants ) were already inside the gates .

In Australia the only thing both sides of government agree on is to have the highest immigration per capita in the western world.

I have examined several videos and read interviews concerning this incident. I consider the instigators to have been some black men calling themselves Israelites. These people insulted and spat at the boys, arousing their anger. Nathan Phillips came forward with his drum and got between the antagonists in an effort to keep them separated. The boys’ reaction was mixed, with some of them jeering Phillips and others joining in, to their minds, by clapping and chanting along with Phillips. No adult supervisors were in evidence, which I consider to be a mistake by the school. A couple of the people who came with Phillips insulted the boys, telling them to “go the fuck back to Europe.” Interestingly, the people most responsible for the nastiness, the black “Israelites,” seemed to skate off into the periphery and escaped attention and blame. Although some of the boys exhibited poor conduct, others seemed simply confused, even asking what was going on here. It didn’t help that one of the boys’ mothers was confused and thought that the blacks were Muslims, so it was widely reported that the boys were harassing Muslims (when, actually, the blacks were insulting the boys). A real case of social media pile-on. The boys were not blameless, but neither were they as demonic as they were portrayed to be.

The boys were not blameless, eh? Well we won’t get in your face or beat the drum about it, but they were white, probably toxic or pre-toxic males, with penises. Better give them a smack for simply being boys trying to enjoy their day otherwise they will grow to be abusers or rapists, eh?

They werent marching down some city road blocking traffic. They were at the March for life in Washington D.C. on an area specifically devoted to gatherings like that. March for life is about a boring a “protest” as you’ll find usually.

It’s only divisive if you agree that anybody wearing any symbol of their politics, religion, race, gender or the like is. Wearing pants is divisive if you believe women don’t wear them. Sure, non-Trump supporters don’t wear MAGA hats, but then again wearing the hat of your president’s party seems hardly divisive unless you want it divided.

“It’s only divisive if you agree that anybody wearing any symbol of their politics, religion, race, gender or the like is.”

Nope – not quite. Some religious garb are more divisive than others. Compare wearing the Burqa Vs the Cross.

These kids come from a Conservative Catholic background. Their “teachers” very likely understood perfectly well that wearing those hats would make them stand out. And they were clearly there to cause a scene.

@Amin, MAGA hats are only divisive because the leftist media decided they were. Was Obama’s “change” poster divisive? It had more reason to be considered so, because it was based off of a similar portrait of communist murderer Che.

What’s wrong with going to a Catholic school? Or engaging in a march, particularly one that is not about them demanding things for themselves, but marching for those who can’t march for themselves?

They were not left alone. They had an adult chaperone who gave them permission to chant school spirit songs to drown out the racist and homophobic abuse being hurled at them by adult cult members.

The Vimeo video I linked to above doesn’t show any obvious presence of adult chaperones among the throng of students. When I was in the Boy Scouts, the ratio of adults-to-scouts was roughly 1-10, and I didn’t see anything like that in any of the videos I have watched. Even advocates of the ‘boys will be boys’ excuse need to acknowledge that allowing students to mill around aimlessly while waiting for a bus to arrive is a terrible idea, even if the Black Israelites hadn’t offered provocation. And getting the students pumped up with school chants was another terrible idea! Why didn’t a chaperone say anything to the student who stripped to the waist?

In the US, parochial education is permitted and in some states even encouraged with tax credits. Maybe the Catholic HS curriculum includes a section on respect for other faith traditions, but my understanding is that Catholic theology is based on the idea that the RC Church is the only pathway to salvation. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with that theology, but it may encourage distrust of, and disrespect for, other faith traditions.

I love how it’s now ok to call something “divisive” when what one really means is “this causes me to be really upset.” The object itself is not ‘divisive.’ I am not one for Left/Right dichotomies, but the “left” definitely falls prey to this illogic far more than the ‘right.’ Surely you see, @Amin, that I could really dislike, say, Obama’s slogan, “the audacity of hope,” because it echoes Jeremiah Wright’s slogan, and Wright is a known anti-Semite. That doesn’t mean the slogan itself is ‘divisive.’ Or I find forced-wearing of a hijab reprehensible (not wearing by choice)– and indeed that is literally divisive in many Muslim cultures. Even so, if I saw someone wearing a hijab or Obama’s slogan or whatever, I would simply move on, feeling that the person was expressing his/her beliefs, and they are entitled to do so.

I wouldn’t be enraged. I wouldn’t say they should be relieved they were ‘left alone.’ I wouldn’t imply, like you, that they were to blame because they are catholic or Jewish or Muslim or whatever religion.

The “left” is now lowering itself to the emotional level of a 2 year old, where visceral unthinking fury, temper tantrums, and violence are the primary way to react to something that upsets you, and where you determine what deserves your wrath, based entirely on how it makes you yourself feel, then subscribe the object itself with your own emotions.

The Catholic school had a permit for the ‘March for Life’ but did NOT have a permit to assemble at the Lincoln Memorial. One could argue that the students were just sight-seeing, but a group of a hundred or more male students can’t just be called a bunch of average tourists. The very size of the group is intimidating, especially without enough adult chaperones.

The school administration deserves most of the blame, not the students. The school deserves harsh criticism for trying to mix business [march] and pleasure [sight-seeing] on a single trip, particularly when the US govt is partly shut down, most public museums are closed, and the National Park Service [which normally supervises the Lincoln Memorial] is hobbled by the shutdown.

The Indigenous Peoples March DID have a permit to assemble at the memorial.

A man in a red ball cap [not MAGA] who was apparently part of the Indigenous Peoples March DID yell ‘Go back to Europe. This is not your land.’ to a student and also voiced some obscenities. Someone later said ‘Go back to Africa,’ but it isn’t clear who said that or to whom it was directed. I thought that Nathan Phillips was the only person filmed who kept his dignity throughout.

Finally, I agree with what Phillips later told the Detroit Free Press:

“These young, white American kids who were being taught in their Catholic school, their doctrine, their truth, and when they found out there’s more truth out there than what they’re being taught, they were offended, they were insulted, they were scared, and that’s how they responded. One thing that I was taught in my Marine Corp training is that a scared man will kill you. And that’s what these boys were. They were scared.”

On January 18, 2019, we are uniting the Indigenous peoples across the World to stand together to bring awareness to the injustices affecting Indigenous men, women and children. Indigenous people from North, Central and South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean are a target of genocide. Currently, many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, divided families by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality with little or no resources and awareness of this injustice. We Must Unite and Help!!

The HS mascot is a ‘Kentucky Colonel,’ but not the affable Col. Sanders that people may be familiar with. Instead, this image is similar to the mustachioed mascot named “Colonel Reb” that [dis]graced the Univ. of Mississippi sports teams for decades before being retired. That mascot was judged to be too racist even for Mississippians.

Covington Catholic has a nearly all white faculty and a predominantly white student body, so encountering Native Americans and their indigenous traditions must have been quite a shock to them. No wonder a student shouted “What is going on?”

Yes, they did. They were having their event across the street – the National Mall is a large space.

the HS students crashed the event

Wrong. Though the Indians were using a portion of the National Mall, presumably the space they were assigned, they were not given exclusive use of all the National Mall. For example, the Black Hebrew Israelites (BWI) were also using the some of the National Mall. I’d wager other people were using the National Mall too. The students were using it as an assembly point to wait for buses.

Here’s the interesting fact about demonstrations and assigned spaces; in public areas others may witness them. They may even stand beside them. Sit or squat as well. And because the First Amendment is a thing, people are allowed to say things. They may cheer, jeer, or do nothing at all. They may clap, snap their fingers, skip, jump, stomp their feet, and even shake their booties. One’s reservation of a public space does not infringe on others’ rights. Lucky for the fragile Indians, the students did not walk over to their space.

The reservation allows the group to put up a stage and other facilities, such as heating tents, potable water stations, etc. It does give them carte blanche them to silence others.

The Indians then walked across the street, moving away from their reserved space and stage, ignored the racist and homophobic shouts by the BWI that had been going on for quite some time, and made a beeline right for the students. Sadly for the BWI, they were not gifted the healing drum beats too. Must be the Indians are racist for not sharing those with blacks.

I visited the Indians’ website using the URL you provided. In its FAQs:I’m not Indigenous, can I attend ?Yes, The Indigenous Peoples March is for any person, regardless of gender or gender identity, race, creed, and nationality who believes Indigenous rights are human rights.

Look at that. The public was invited. Let’s hope for the drummer’s safety they won’t make the same mistake next year.

Typically, though, the ceremonies are chaired by our very conservative pro-life Republican Lieutenant Governor, Jenean Hampton, who happens to be the first black female Lieutenant Governor in the South. If our current Governor is appointed to a Cabinet position this year, she will become the first black female Governor in US history.

Perhaps if you had a more diverse and inclusive set of sources, one which included the voices of conservative pro-life American Southerners, you would have had access to this information before elaborating your opinions.

Mentions of mascots, all white faculty, predominately white student body, etc. are offered up as diversionary tactics. “Look over there! Puhleeeease”! Take it as a tacit admission that yet again another half-cocked contrivance has blown up in their faces. It’s been a bad end to a very bad week for progressives. The Buzzfeed story was debunked. The Women’s March goose steppers were hung out to dry. The Women’s March events that occurred were all fizzle. And sizzle of Standing With Smiles ended up burning them.

Still, the Contortionists’ Olympiad is a spectacle to behold. Unimaginable twists and tumbles.

“The HS mascot is a ‘Kentucky Colonel,’ but not the affable Col. Sanders that people may be familiar with. Instead, this image is similar to the mustachioed mascot named “Colonel Reb” that [dis]graced the Univ. of Mississippi sports teams for decades before being retired. That mascot was judged to be too racist even for Mississippians.”

Uh no. I am a Kentucky Colonel. How? My brother worked for the Gov back in the 80’s and gave it tome as a present. I have access to buy tickets to the Ky Colonel bbq every Sunday after Derby. Vats of Burgoo and Derby Pie with lots of Mint Juleps. All races and creeds are there including tacky seer sucker jackets on men.

Not one iota of that has anything to do with the news’ fraudulent and ideology-based reporting of the story. There’s nothing you can dig up about the school that will retroactively give reason for: (1) Phillips inserting himself, then later changing his story, (2) the Black Hebrews instigating and taunting the kids and Indigenous alike, (3) journalists jumping the gun.

Stay on topic. Stop diverting and deflecting with whataboutist justifications for lousy decisions.

Covington Catholic has a nearly all white faculty and a predominantly white student body, so encountering Native Americans and their indigenous traditions must have been quite a shock to them. No wonder a student shouted “What is going on?”

Covington High is a 10-minute drive from Cincinnati. So much for the backwater reach.

I’ve got an idea. Maybe less assholic “street theater” at this point would be a GOOD thing.
As in go home, stay home, STFU, and live your life. Let the clowns in DC kick each other around the chessboard while you eat popcorn. Isn’t that easy? No hysteria, no bruises, no doxxing, no death threats, hey, social media use is optional, y’know? Kind of the way adults used to live their lives before the 1960’s when the asshats all went crazy. Eh?

@Jack B. Nimble, you engage in all sorts of twists in logic but the one I’ll address is this magical thinking in which you somehow know what someone is thinking and feeling based either on a) the expression of their face or b) the group they belong to. It’s ludicrous. Surely you have enough life experience to know that you can’t even know what your loved one is thinking much less a total stranger, and that when you believe you know what someone is thinking, that has more to do with your own immaturity or else your own transference or delusion than anything else. Phillips cannot possibly say what the minors were feeling or thinking. It is reprehensible that he implies that these teens would ‘kill’ him. And more reprehensible that you quote him. As a teacher I’m really really disgusted by adults racing to threaten minor children.

What blame exactly does the school ‘deserve.’ As a teacher I can assure you that kids go to marches *all the time* and they *always* combine it with sight seeing. The kids did nothing wrong. What expression should the boys have on their faces when a random man walks up to them and plays drums in their faces after they’d been called ‘f**ggot” (I can’t even write it out), and the African American kid had been called *n***?

You don’t need a permit to visit the Lincoln Memorial. Be real. If you did, then for a century or more, students across America would be breaking the law on field trips across the land. I’ve taken our 6th grade class of 200, or the whole school of 600, to many many public places over the years. You find a group of 100 teens ‘intimidating’? What is wrong with you? I teach in an African American school and as I said I often take far large groups of both boys and girls out, larger than this–I would like to have a few words with anyone who said we needed a permit because they found my kids “intimidating.’ You’re just making this stuff up to try to make yourself feel justified in condemning the kids based on fake news. Sorry. It’s fake news.

Stop distorting what I said.The Lincoln Memorial is open 24/7 for tourist visits, but with the govt. shutdown the Park Service Rangers who would normally patrol the building are not present. I suggested that having the students sight-see in a city that is mostly shut down, including public museums and most other govt. facilities that tourists visit, was a big mistake. The absence of park rangers compounded the problem of having an insufficient number of adult chaperones.

As for large numbers of chanting young males being intimidating, what if the tables were turned? How about a small number of Boy Scouts surrounded by a hundred bearded Muslim men shaking their fists in unison and shouting Allāhu akbar! Heck even a dozen teens can be intimidating to older people, like if they link arms or otherwise obstruct passage along a sidewalk.

If readers can watch another video of the incident, I encourage them to watch a video of the events before ‘smirking boy’ came face to face with Phillips:

The small Native American contingent arrives at about the 4 min mark, and after that we see various students jumping up and down in unison as Phillips beats his small drum. They also chant Hey! Hey! and shake their fists as though keeping time to the beat of the drum. Illegal or violent? Of course not. Immature and disrespectful? Certainly!

This isn’t the first time that the Covington Catholic staff has let student behavior get out of hand and cast a bad light on the school:

“…..the official Covington Catholic High School YouTube account published a video last January boasting its basketball school spirit, and several clips, including one from 2012, showcase attendees chanting in black face, a mockery of the opposing players. The school took down the video later on Monday…..”

In an effort to save the narrative, the Twitter warriors and their lackeys (e.g., Jack) disseminate more edited videos showing a disturbing pattern of teenagers acting like…teenagers. Shock! Horror!

The creators of these pastiches get the audience to judge the actors against an unrealistic ideal by priming them with suggestive remarks about scandalous behaviour. But a critical thinking adult should be judging against the real behaviour of teenagers, including his own behaviour when he was a teenager. And he should also be reflecting on how his own behaviour would look on video now.

Anyway, Jack, you’re complicit in a smear campaign against school kids. Blaming the staff doesn’t exculpate you from targeting kids. You should be ashamed of yourself.

If one reads these comments, the HS students are described mostly as “kids, children, poor lads, victims, boys,” and so on. These students are only a few years from graduation–when should they start showing adult-like behavior like self-control? When do they graduate from boyhood to manhood?

Calling these HS students ‘kids’ or ‘children’ is intended to prime the idea that criticism of their boorish behavior is a form of child abuse, but it is really a form of infantilization. But I have said repeatedly that the criticism should be directed mostly at school staff, and I would add that the parents may deserve some blame.

When Black or lower-class white teens behave badly, the media of all stripes are quick to blame the parents: absent fathers, drug-addicted or sexually-promiscuous mothers, lack of good role models, etc. But CovCath is an expensive private school, so most of the parents are not lower-class. It is natural to wonder–what values are being instilled at home and at school?

BTW–there is no evidence that the video was edited: no jump cuts or fade outs. So your charge that this was a pastiche is false. FWIW, I thought that the other students came off looking worse than ‘smirking boy.”

It is also worth noting that the parents of ”smirking boy” hired a publicist and put his name before the public. I didn’t name anyone except Nathan Phillips, and I mostly described the students using the neutral term “students,” not children.

I may be showing my age, but my parents and HS staff would never have tolerated this behavior–punishment would have been swift and certain.

I give up. @ JBN, you are just making stuff up now. There is no way to change someone’s mind who doesn’t want it changed. I used to be Left–I voted Obama twice, and in all my life had never voted anything but Dem. What opened my eyes was one stance a few years back shared by most Dems that I disagreed with. I happened upon a Fox news contributor who to my astonishment – for I believed all Fox news folks to be morons as I was told – very articulately outlining my own arguments. Since I’d been told that Fox news is all things fake, evil. and stupid, I saw that in this case I was told an untruth. I am by no means saying Fox news is the epitome of truth and rigor (no way) but I’m saying that once I saw that one talking point was untrue, I started to see other talking points that were likewise untrue. I stopped thinking with my Team and Group, stopped reasoning backward from a spoon fed talking point, stopped forging my identity from a bunch of cynical politicians and an even more cynical corporate media, nor from groupthink in social media. Once my eyes were opened, I couldn’t look back. Now I’m probably classical liberal, which right now is filled by some (not nearly all) Republicans and some Dems (not nearly all). I would encourage everyone to think for themselves as opposed to deciding beforehand what ‘side’ you’re on, then reasoning backward. I know I used to do that, although I didn’t admit it to myself.

In this case, as soon as I saw the claim, I thought I needed to check it out more. I knew that the corporate media is desperate for clicks. Good thing the entire video was *already* easily available–well before the media went crazy. (So you see they weren’t duped. They were just lazy or desperate for a narrative they liked, and lied outright.) IT was easy then to see that the spin was false.

I teach students this age, many far far more troubled. I’ve taught criminals, I’ve taught the mentally ill. They are children. Many act far far worse than this, trust me. Anyone attacking them with unfounded lies – with literally zero proof except for mind reading – and calling for their heads is repulsive to me. Adults in power attacking minors–what have we come to.

You state that HS students are children, but doesn’t that support my claim that there should have been more chaperones present? How is it responsible of the school admin to leave immature children milling around waiting for the bus to arrive, with little adult supervision?

In case you can’t see it, I am making a conservative argument here about the importance of parents, teachers and trip chaperones as no-nonsense role models and discipline enforcers. Heck, even a Southern Baptist leader had this to say about the incident:

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in his daily podcast Monday that the incidents involving the Covington students show how easily social media and subsequent coverage can spiral into mischaracterizations.

If one reads these comments, the HS students are described mostly as “kids, children, poor lads, victims, boys,” and so on. These students are only a few years from graduation–when should they start showing adult-like behavior like self-control? When do they graduate from boyhood to manhood?

Not a single adult there—including the ones who filmed, uploaded, and disseminated the bullshit story in the media and fantasized about punching the kid on antisocial media—showed any adult-like behaviour. But you single out the kids “only a few years from graduation” for abuse, not because they didn’t show any self-control, but because they didn’t act in conformity with your double-standard. Phillips is what, seventy years old? Yet you don’t even expect adult-like behaviour from him, let alone adult behaviour.

Calling these HS students ‘kids’ or ‘children’ is intended to prime the idea that criticism of their boorish behavior is a form of child abuse, but it is really a form of infantilization. But I have said repeatedly that the criticism should be directed mostly at school staff, and I would add that the parents may deserve some blame.

And what form of criticism is shaming them on antisocial media, Jack? Are you fixing their infantilization by smearing them here? The arm-chair parent as hero.

When Black or lower-class white teens behave badly, the media of all stripes are quick to blame the parents: absent fathers, drug-addicted or sexually-promiscuous mothers, lack of good role models, etc. But CovCath is an expensive private school, so most of the parents are not lower-class. It is natural to wonder–what values are being instilled at home and at school?

Talk about ugly moral equivalences! No one cites absent fathers, etc., to explain the smirking and jeering of teenagers; they invoke such things to explain murder, theft, delinquency, rape, drug-dealing, and dependency. Yet you lump them all under the euphemism behaving “badly,” as if class and race were the only moral differences between getting smirked at and getting ass-raped and strangled. I take it you live in that special bubble of privilege that allows you to see disconformity with your tastes and feelings as equivalent to murder.

no evidence that the video was edited: no jump cuts or fade outs.

Are you writing from the 1960s?

It is also worth noting that the parents of ”smirking boy” hired a publicist and put his name before the public.

Someone takes an edited video of your kid and uploads it to antisocial media. Then an unscrupulous media and the usual gaggle of moral degenerates start an online hate campaign against your kid, flooding your home phone and social media with threats of violence against him and you. Naturally, you freak out and hire a publicist to get you out of it.

Then some arsehole online comes along and calls your moral purity into question because, well, a truly Good and Righteous Person like Jack B. Nimble would call up the same guttersnipes in the media who stirred up a vigilante mob against his kid to set things straight. Is that how it goes, Jack? Seriously, you need to take the ideological blinders off and grow some compassion for people.

my parents and HS staff would never have tolerated this behavior–punishment would have been swift and certain.

You have infinite tolerance for adults acting like moral degenerates. You haven’t said a word about any of the adults involved: Not Phillips, not the BWI, not even Reza Aslan. No one but the high school kids got singled out for abuse. Yet we’re all supposed to believe you’re shocked by it all. I say you’re completely full of shit.

The worst behavior was by the adults in the BHI, next the adult Indians, and lastly the boys. In the incident the most the most they can be accused of rowdiness, and this is some of the tamest rowdiness I’ve seen. School chants?! Send in the Marines! For some reason progressives demand they behave respectfully to a man banging a drum, uninvited, just a few centimetres from a boy’s face.

So desperate are progressives to vilify the boys that they ignore the incidents of boys jeering homophobic language used by the BHI. The boys even rallied to the support of their black classmates when the BHI called them niggers – with the hard r. Isn’t this the best the man can be?

Re the parents, teachers, and school, certainly they’ve done a fine job educating boys to reject homophobia (Catholic school, isn’t it?) as well as standing one’s ground when someone gets in your face in the attempt to incite. The boys didn’t didn’t behave recklessly or violently. They didn’t intrude in other’s personal space. No one was injured. They didn’t use the intrusion as an excuse to push back. In contrast, listen to the BHI constantly threaten to hit a skateboarder with a staff because he’s too close to them – he’s several feet away.

There is a wonderful irony of progressives absolving the antics of adult university students, saying they’re only a few years out of childhood, and now attacking actual minors for not behaving like adults. The progressive world view is inside out, upside down, and back to front.

Ultimately, it’s the MAGA hats and the boys’ race and sex that did them in. Progressives see that, their minds cease to work, and they lash out. Appears their educations, morals, and cosmopolitan smugness failed them.

A group of boys from Kentucky proved themselves to be better than you.

The boys even rallied to the support of their black classmates when the BHI called them niggers – with the hard r. Isn’t this the best the man can be?

This point needs reiterating. The fact that the boys defended their black schoolmates doesn’t even get a mention by Jack or the media progressives. Yet this is exactly the behaviour they claim we should all engage in—the best a man can get, indeed.

In my day, if someone had called a high school buddy of mine a nigger, he’d be shitting his teeth. Would my old school behaviour have pleased Jack et al.? Or would he and his progressive media allies now be calling this incident a mass hate crime because the BHIs were black? I think we know the answer.

The sad truth in this is that all the talk about expected behaviour is empty cant offered up to give the appearance that there is a right answer when there isn’t. Any action will be turned into yet-another-act-of-aggression-by-the-white-monster when it suits the progressive narrative to so characterize it.

Blaming the victims, children, and ignoring the fact that an old adult political radical flat out lied.
Classy. Not.
The kids have been threatened by radical vile lefties for tolerating verbal assault and vile comments with class and dignity.

“….Of all the death threats I’ve gotten in the last two days for registering my visceral disgust at the behavior of those teens towards an elderly veteran —and I’ve gotten a lot, and I’ll get more for tweeting this — the best are the ones pretending to “warn” me about someone else….”

Given you no longer sustain the assertions that the boys were at fault for the incident involving the Indians, BHI, and themselves, I’ll take that as a concession.

Nonetheless, I salute Mr Phillips’s service in the Vietnam Times War during the days he wasn’t AWOL. It gave him the courage to not cower from smiles and smirks. A role model for progressives such as you to emulate.

To your first point, I lived in DC for seven years. If you’ve ever spent a single afternoon on the National Mall during tourist season, there are dozens of, if not more, large groups of school kids of all ages (but mostly late middle and high school) all over the grounds of the monuments, piling on and off buses, waiting interminably for the next segment of their scheduled trips around the city. A group of a hundred or more high school kids on the National Mall is as about as common a sight as you’ll see on any given day down there. If you’re arguing that their particular group was intimidating, well based on what? White skin? Male genitalia? Come off it. I’m a grown man, and I personally wouldn’t be intimidated by any of those faces. Those are baby faces. If you find them intimidating, I suggest you take up a martial art. Phillips certainly didn’t find them intimidating enough to prevent him from sauntering into their midst and getting in their faces, however outnumbered he might have been (this is not disputable – if you have eyes, the evidence is available for you).

To your point in agreeing with Phillips’ quote above – that man is full of it, pure and simple. The way that man has conducted himself on national television in telling one bald faced lie after another is utterly bereft of dignity. And for him to attempt to excuse and somehow justify the behavior of people like the Black Hebrew Israelites? Utterly contemptible. Again, I lived in DC for 7 years and had the displeasure of running across the Black Hebrew Israelites on a number of occasions. They hang around the metro stations, and I promise you, they harass EVERYONE, with the most vile and disgusting garbage you can hear coming out of anyone’s mouth of any color. What you hear in the video is a warm up for them. I have heard them berate both black women and Jewish men with equally bilious vitriol. They are certified bats**t crazy. So no, Mr. Phillips, what those boys heard was not a different truth than what they’ve been taught, and they should have been offended and insulted by those men. If you or any other person are pretending that what those men were saying to those kids (again, not disputable or contestable – if you have ears, the evidence is widely available) is acceptable in any context, then it says volumes about your principles or lack thereof.

Bottom line – it seems a lot of adults in this country have allowed a stupid red hat to corrupt, degrade, and implode their ethical foundations, and I’m not necessarily talking about Trump supporters.

You: “……If you or any other person are pretending that what those men were saying to those kids …..is acceptable in any context…”

X. Citoyen: “……You haven’t said a word about any of the adults involved: Not Phillips, not the BWI, not even Reza Aslan…..”

It’s illogical to assume that, if I am criticizing the students’ behavior and the passivity of their chaperones, then I must be supportive of, or at least neutral toward, the BWI, Reza Aslan, etc.

I don’t agree with the taunting and mockery of the students by the BWI speaker. But the Black Israelites seem to be despised by just about everyone, so criticizing them is going after pretty low-hanging fruit.

All the bluster by you, X.Citoyen, ga gamba and others can’t obscure the fact that the trip chaperones deserve much of the blame, a charge that is being made in many media outlets. For example:

“…….I watched the videotaped confrontation between Covington Catholic students, Native American marchers and Black Hebrew Israelites in Washington, D.C., and couldn’t help wondering: Where were the adults?

There were at least five chaperones in front of the Lincoln Memorial with the 150 or so students when the incident happened, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported Monday. None stopped the students as they confronted African-American protesters who had shouted slurs at them.

Nor did they step in when the students surrounded an elderly Native American man and mocked his singing, a few students making what appeared to be a demeaning tomahawk chop motion.

The man, Nathan Phillips, said later he had stepped between the students and the other group to defuse the tension.

But it wasn’t his responsibility. It was the chaperones’ job…….

Most of the time, chaperoning a school trip is easy duty. But it comes with the responsibility of making sure students are safe.

The Covington chaperones didn’t do that.

According to student accounts, a chaperone gave them the OK to shout school-pride chants to counter the hateful things shouted at them.

This wasn’t a time for school pride. It was a moment to swallow that pride and walk away…..”

NOTE: if there were 5 chaperones at the Lincoln Memorial and 150 students, that is a ratio of 1:30! The lack of a strong adult presence allowed things to get out of hand. How many times to I have to say that?

You, ga gamba, X. Citoyen and others are so blinded by ideology that you can’t see that I’m making a *conservative* argument about the need for adults to take responsibility for, and control over, the students’ behavior. That’s not a diversion.

I’m making a *conservative* argument about the need for adults to take responsibility for, and control over, the students’ behavior.

I don’t define school cheers as antagonistic. It’s perfectly acceptable response to the hate that was tossed their way by the BHI. What a good choice by the boys. The boys were mostly well behaved. They defended their black classmates from BHI racial abuse and jeered homophobic slurs. The conservative argument is stand your ground, defend your friends and your principles, and not to shirk away like cowards. I have no complaint with the chaperones. I see that you think 1:30 is insufficient, but conservatism includes self-reliance. We don’t need nannies hovering over us. BHI and the Indians certainly need monitoring. The boys did nothing wrong. The chaperones did nothing wrong. The boys and the chaperones had as much right to be in the National Mall as anyone else. They kept their distance from both groups and didn’t use slurs and racial epithets.

The article you linked you continues with the lie: The man, Nathan Phillips, said later he had stepped between the students and the other group to defuse the tension.

The BHI had been in conflict with the Indians long before the boys arrived. Several Indians approached them and asked them to cease. BHI refused. If Spreading Bull was honest, and we know now he isn’t, he would’ve approached BHI to defuse the tension because they were the instigators and the perpetuators of almost all of it. One of Spreading Bull’s fellow drummers said they approached the boys to protect the BHI from the boys. This is a fabrication. BHI was never in danger. During the pow wow of closeness and drumming another Indian told the boys to go back to Europe. That’s not defusing tension. It’s exacerbating it. And still the boys stayed non violent and well behaved.

It was only when Spreading Bull walked into the group of boys that he was surrounded. Many who surrounded him were his Indian cohort and others to include at least one BHI fella recording the event – the fella in the Rasta-style knit cap. People witnessed the spectacle and recorded it. No pushing. No shoving. It was a big nuffin burger that people such as yourself thought was nourishing for the cause.

The boys are guilty of wardrobe offence and facecrime, which exist only in the minds of the crazed progressives.

Strange. I have higher expectations for adults behavior but that’s just me. The adults chose not to ignore rowdy boys. I think grown men were triggered by MAGA hats. That seems to be a trigger these days.

My congressman, John Yarmuth, a trust fund baby Who ran an alternative left wing news paper here for years, called for a ban on teenagers wearing MAGA hats. It was front and center in local media. He claimed that it was poisoning young minds. It was lift a gift from the gods. I can’t wait to use his totalitarian screen shots next campaign season.

One of the videos showed that Phillips basically was getting into the lad’s face with his drum and chanting and had a whole entourage behind him filming, with other angry indians abusing some other students. The poor lad in question was a classic case of a deer in headlights, not knowing what to do but stand there with an embarrassed smile on his face.
Listening to Phillips give his side of the story on an interview demonstrated his dishonesty and suggested that he was using his “cultural expression” as a prop and shield for his abuse.
We get the same mentality in Australia with aboriginal persons charging thousands of dollars for various ceremonies to open government etc., that are basically just a con.

Diversity without division? Most places in the world are very diverse with minimal divisiveness apparent. Most people are disinterested in ancestral lineage. Although DNA tests are the norm these days and we find out we are all, or most of us, quite the mélange of lineages.

Depends on what you mean by diversity. If you mean racial diversity then no most places on earth are not diverse at all. Only Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and the US are racially diverse. That represents only a small chunk of the world population. If you mean ideological diversity than its a mixed bag. IVY league schopls are some of the most racially diverse places while also being some of the least ideologically diverse places on earth.

“Only Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and the US are racially diverse.”

Eh? India? Brazil? Malaysia?

Even if your extremely narrow vision of race and ethnicity is applied your quote isn’t true. I guess it is probably pointles to point out “ethnic” differences between Taminls, Moors and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka to you.

Having been to Sri Lanka four times in the last three years I can tell you that in the North (Jaffna area) they speak Tamil and are almost entirely Tamil and the rest of the country speak and are almost entirely Sinhalese. They are “at peace” but are in reality two separate people. Having travelled to Malaysia often with my Malaysian partner if you consider Malaysia an egalitarian diverse country you are mistaken. As for my visit’s to China their homogeny is very apparent. Perhaps you should travel more or open your eyes when you do.

Where in the world do you get the idea that diverse places are peaceful? In the middle east, they persecute christians, Jews, Baha’is and even Sufis. Where Sunnis and Shi’ah overlap they bomb each others churches. In India there is strong caste system and the Hindus and Moslems have at it on a regular basis. In Brazil, there are terms for 20 gradations of racial mixing, with special privileges to go along with it.

Minimal divisiveness apparent? Tell that to the Uighers in China. To the Indians in Fiji. To the ethnic Chinese in Malaya. To the Anglophones in Quebec. To the Tutsis in Rwanda. To the Bahai’s in Iran. To the Rohingya in Burma. To the Shia and Sunnis in a dozen Muslim countries. To the Kurds in and around Turkey. One could on in this vein all day.

Mike N – Do you have stats to prove that? Seems like the happiest and best off places are more culturally homogeneous, like how our E Pluribus Unum suggests as an ideal that’s long gone in an intersectionality victimhood culture.

Mike N,
Go live in China or Japan or Korea and check that diverddiv idea of yours.
Or go to any traditional Moslem country and preach out your diversity. But leave next of kin contact information.
Tolerance is what we were supposed to have.
Diversity is what the left has forced on us.

1:06:45 – Threatening an innocent bystander with violence
1:07:49 – Black Hebrews calls the teens “incest babies.”
1:12:36 – Nathan Phillips, Indian drummer of sacred healing beats, marches to the spot with others, stops walking, and faces the students. He approaches the teens, not the other way around as reported by the media.
1:15:25 – “This is a bunch of future school shooters. When y’all gonna go shoot up another school?” asked by the Black Hebrews
1:18:15 – They get called “crackers” multiple times.
1:18:35 – “You only got one nigger in the crowd,” said by the Black Hebrews
1:18:42 – “Oh, you got two niggers in the crowd,” said by the Black Hebrews
1:19:05 – “Get out, nigger. Get out,” said by the Black Hebrews
1:21:27 – “This is a faggot child molester,” said by the Black Hebrews
1:21:52 – “Christ is coming back to kick yo cracker ass,” said by the Black Hebrews
1:25:00 – “But you give faggots rights,” said by the Black Hebrews. Teens jeer this.
1:27:00 – “There will be no peace until there is bloodshed,”﻿ said by the Black Hebrews.

Keep in mind that protests around the world often involve mocking, shouts, jeers, curses, and other abuse and nothing is made of it. It’s kind of the standing operating procedure when opposing groups come into contact. The students don’t display most of these typical protest behaviours. They are amongst the most well-behaved “demonstrators” I’ve ever seen. But because Dances with Drums is an Indian everyone is supposed to revere him. For reasons.

Have I mentioned he’s a Vietnam Viet? He’s a vet. Did you see that written on his forehead? And vets too are sacred.

He isn’t even a Vietnam vet. Someone did the math on Twitter and found that there is virtually no mathematical possibility he joined at 17 years old (his claim), graduated training, and was in Vietnam for even a minute. He would’ve graduated around the time the last Marine unit was shipped out of Vietnam.

You weren’t there unless you actually were there. And you weren’t really there unless you were E-6 or less and spend a few nights in the field and had been inserted into a few LZs and spent some time walking point on a few patrols.

This is an important distinction. My Dad joined the Army in 74, never served a day in Vietnam, but he is labelled a Vietnam Era Vet. He would never claim to be a Vietnam Vet. I went back in after 9/11. Volunteered for duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, ended up stateside providing medical support. I am authorized to wear a GWOT Ribbon and a OIF/OEF ribbon, but I do not claim to be an Iraqi Freedom vet, because I never served down range.

It’s not the people who are ‘evil.’ It’s the super-wealthy, global oligarchs seeking to consolidate their stranglehold on all the money and power in the world by feeding the masses divisive information and sowing chaos.

Right or left, we the people need to come together to fight this cancer which is a genuine threat to rule by the people.

stelopolvo Why entitled? What do you know about their lives? Why bullies? Whom did they approach and accost? What games are they playing, other than doing some group cheers? What the heck are you talking about?

Posts the highly edited 2-minute version of the video and comments by a deranged person looking to doxx the students, but who decides not too because they’re under 18. Instead, goes after the students’ parents.

The BBC, as mainstream as you can get (disliked by both the Right and Left, equally) are sticking to the story the Hat wearing thug, by definition, was in the wrong. Not that you can wear a MAGA hat and not be of course! Occam’s Razor.

Lies! How do you know the media was lying, rather than just copying content (as they do as it is cheap). The problem is that news is entertainment, and getting and retaining consumer attention is an incredibly competitive situation – so media outlets pretty much only care about emotionalising us, not what is true.

The real question is how does one resolve this, without having to resort to using government to enforce standards?

Perhaps many of those who read Quillette are against Web censorship by companies, so would disagree with Infowars banning, but I don’t.

Would people support a rule that all profit based and company structured media must be behind paywalls – in order to enable sufficient income for quality fact checking journalism. Nope they would not wish that either.

There appear to be no suitable solutions, so that means we just have to live with it.

Jimhaze, I don’t think we do anything about it. The solution is worse than the disease. Cable TV/News is dying. Social media is becoming irrelevant due to censoring. Rubin and Peterson left Patreon to support censored people they don’t even agree with and so on. I have hope the cryptocosm is going to really change things.

Before the advent of the myth of “objective journalism” and journalism schools, most news sources were highly partisan and everyone knew it. News during and after the revolutionay war is so interesting. It was cruel and mean! But, That was more honest. We are inching our way there, again.

Like Media Matters? That stuff never works. What we need is a seriously educated population not ignorant sjws. . School choice. Competition. I was part of a school choice scholarship program here and inner city moms lined up by the hundreds. It’s time. Way past time.

Pay for your news. If you only get your information from free news sources, you basically get what you pay for.

Don’t group legitimate journalism in with the oligarchy-controlled media that serves up free information designed to sow discord and chaos among the people.

If you’re not currently paying for a subscription to the NY Times, The Washington Post, et al., how can you evaluate its reliability? You have to pay a fee to read it and if you find it unreliable, you get the satisfaction of canceling your subscription.

Not true with free sites that shovel agitprop click bait into our gaping maws in order to boost ad revenue.

“If you’re not currently paying for a subscription to the NY Times, The Washington Post, et al., how can you evaluate its reliability? You have to pay a fee to read it and if you find it unreliable, you get the satisfaction of canceling your subscription.”

This incident is a clear display that the narrative of entitlement, advantage and privilege is actually the polar opposite of what the citizenry are being led to believe by a political faction that is directly profiting in terms of consolidated power from these manufactured incidents of tribal warfare just as any greedy group of war-hawks did in the proceeding century.

“Torture” has a certain definition. The same “philosopher who supports the use of torture in a narrow set of circumstances on utilitarian grounds” might well question the author’s arbitrary use of the word “torture” to describe what that philosopher “supports.. in a narrow set of circumstances on utilitarian grounds”.

But of course, we “elites” know what the author means, right? Wink, wink.

What ARE we talking about? Sleep deprivation? Smacking with a wet noodle? Pulling fingernails? Waterboarding?

He then proceeds to virtue signal exactly where his sympathies lie with the comment- “….unwittingly affirmed President Trump’s demagogic “Fake News” mantra.”

Get that? Our President is “demagogic”. That can’t be good, can it? Let’s google and see, shall we.

First hit (FIRST, mind) – a quote from that great philosopher and world famous person Matthew Yglesias:
“Trump has many of the mannerisms and much of the style of a plebiscitary dictator who wields demagogic rhetoric to turn the crowd against liberal institutions.”

Oh, so the fact that (once again) this “mantra” proves correct also proves that it carries “demagogic” properties? Cooties as well no doubt.

Is this just an obligatory “gosh, guess we got it sorta wrong – (AGAIN)” – piece? With an obligatory swipe at Trump? You decide.

Astounding that it occurs congruently with the latest BuzzFeed calumny.

Aren’t both deregulation and cutting taxes something that benefits one group over another? That’s precisely how a dictator who prefers rich and powerful over equal protection would work in a democratic republic.

Sorry David, I believe in self government and individualism. You may need a nanny Gov to make decisions for your life just count me out. You guys already regulate my small business to death. And the rich just go offshore. I often wonder why bureaucrats think we should trust them to do the right thing? Lol.

Hey Max. There is only one race, the human race. So ”racism” is impossible! I’d suggest you read some elementary biology books, or cast a glance at some basic genetics, before writing another, hopefully not quite as infantile, article. Good luck.

But human populations are rarely isolate anymore. Race is fake, but of course that we can detect where you are from based on your looks/dress/sound, is purely human reason and observation. People with darker skin are easily identified from those with lighter skin. Distinction isn’t the problem; it’s holding people in blame by any such grouping unrelated to the actions of the individual.

but over long term isolation and interbreeding with interlopers has been almost non-existant going back as much as 50000 years in Australia, Americas, Pacific Islands and Sub Saharan Africa, with little to no admixture with outsiders before last few hundred years. Europe, Middle East and Asia were, by contrast, a huge melting pot over last 10-20000 years. Eg Europeans have a few % Neanderthal DNA, Africans none. Asians and Oceania have a few % Denisovan DNA, Africans none of either.http://cdn.sci-news.com/images/2013/12/image_1624_2-Neanderthals.jpg

There are big differences in genetics of different areas of the world, which are expressed in all sort of physical and physiological traits.

It’s amazing white teens are expected to behave better than minority adults. Talk about the bigotry of low expectations. Imagine if white adults had behaved in the same manor to a group of black kids. Spewing racist and homophobic slurs at the kids and then lying about the encounter blaming the kids. Everyone would be outraged by the adults behavior and rightfully so. But since the adults are minorities and the teens are white…..

How does that change what that young man did to an indigenous elder? My gut was churning watching him, but then, I’m status First Nations. You may think you’ve won something here, Quillette, but you’re in for a surprise. Whatever respect Quillette has gained among centrists is now lost.

Yes, a smirkist! A smirkist! The kid is clearly not reverent in the presence of holiness. It doesn’t matter that he does nothing, we know what he is thinking, and he is a badthinker. In the spirit of the Kavanaugh hearings, we can only hope that his entire life is spent as an outcast. Perhaps he can work as a garbage man.

Cora, did you watch the entire video? The kid was literally just standing there while the Native American man walked right up to him and got in his face. The kids just stood there and smiled. He probably felt uncomfortable with someone getting into his personal space and didn’t know how to respond. I wouldn’t have known what to do either. Would you have preferred that the boy backed away? It he had backed away someone would have interpreted that as racist, too.

@Cora, I know you’ll never answer everyone’s request for an explanation, because you can’t, but as you retreat from this space in embarrassment, please think about your instinctive and irrational preference for people of your own race, and try to correct for that racist impulse in the future. Bye-bye!

@ Cora, yeah, my gut was churning too at the way the poor kid just stood there with an uncomfortable smile on his face, not knowing how to respond or what to do as a grown man with huge identitarian privilege got in his face with his entourage of film crew and lackeys backing him up. The poor kid was mobbed by an activist and placed in a lose/lose situation.

To:
.
Laura Keener, Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky
You should be proud of your students’ nonviolent behavior at the Memorial…
Don’t let the anti- “Make America Great Again” mob make you think the students did anything wrong.
They had been the targets of particularly nasty rhetoric from a cult called the “Black Hebrews of Israel.” (BHI) The following video was taken by BHI. The students’ now famous incident occurs at about 01:12:00, but the insults and invective hurled at the students had been going on the entire time.

I never knew how deeply twisted the left-wing media is until I found Jordan Peterson. Articles from the lamesteam media on Peterson were blatant lies, misrepresentations, and told a story to fit a narrative.

This story made it to NZHerald.co.nz, the most popular news site in New Zealand. Legacy Media picked up the story, didn’t bother to fact check it, and then regurgitated their rubbish across the world.

Don’t rush to judgement, don’t start screaming until you know what you’re saying. Everyone take a deep breath…. And read Quillette. The truth shall set us all free. Thank God we have this magazine to lean on amidst all of this lunacy and hatred.

Thomas Sowell has an interesting argument about this “original sin” of being white, even if your ancestors came over after the Civil War–he points out that if some event is in the past, there is nothing you personally could do about it in the absence of time travel. Therefore you cannot be liable or guilty. The claim that you are is simply blood libel (like holding Jews accountable for their ancestors killing Jesus).
The media going after high schools boys at a March for Life is simply evil.

Sigh! Local Portland Fox News on Sunday night ,after all of the story came out ,still presented an incomplete and distorted summary including several interview cuts with Nathan Phillips. Also quoted Catholic church deploring the actions and promising an investigation.

I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them direct derogatory insults at our school group.

The protestors said hateful things. They called us “racists,” “bigots,” “white crackers,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” They also taunted an African American student from my school by telling him that we would “harvest his organs.” I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.

Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school. Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants. We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.

At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant “build that wall” or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.

After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn’t previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.

The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.

I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

During the period of the drumming, a member of the protestor’s entourage began yelling at a fellow student that we “stole our land” and that we should “go back to Europe.” I heard one of my fellow students begin to respond. I motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.

I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.

The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the busses had arrived and it was time to go. I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the busses. At that moment, I thought I had diffused the situation by remaining calm, and I was thankful nothing physical had occurred.

I never understood why either of the two groups of protestors were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.

I was not intentionally making faces at the protestor. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me – to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.

I harbor no ill will for this person. I respect this person’s right to protest and engage in free speech activities, and I support his chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial any day of the week. I believe he should re-think his tactics of invading the personal space of others, but that is his choice to make.

I am being called every name in the book, including a racist, and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination of my family’s name. My parents were not on the trip, and I strive to represent my family in a respectful way in all public settings.

I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood. My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue.

I love my school, my teachers and my classmates. I work hard to achieve good grades and to participate in several extracurricular activities. I am mortified that so many people have come to believe something that did not happen – that students from my school were chanting or acting in a racist fashion toward African Americans or Native Americans. I did not do that, do not have hateful feelings in my heart, and did not witness any of my classmates doing that.

I cannot speak for everyone, only for myself. But I can tell you my experience with Covington Catholic is that students are respectful of all races and cultures. We also support everyone’s right to free speech. I am not going to comment on the words or account of Mr. Phillips, as I don’t know him and would not presume to know what is in his heart or mind. Nor am I going to comment further on the other protestors, as I don’t know their hearts or minds, either.

I have read that Mr. Phillips is a veteran of the United States Marines. I thank him for his service and am grateful to anyone who puts on the uniform to defend our nation. If anyone has earned the right to speak freely, it is a U.S. Marine veteran.

I can only speak for myself and what I observed and felt at the time. But I would caution everyone passing judgement based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas.

I provided this account of events to the Diocese of Covington so they may know exactly what happened, and I stand ready and willing to cooperate with any investigation they are conducting.

If you view the video shot by the Black Hebrews, you’ll see the student’s account matches the events recorded.

Astonishing that a teenager is more calm, composed, and truthful than a group of adult activists and journalists. Good on him. His parents and teachers must be doing something right.

I’d quibble with the statement: “In every video of the incident that I have watched, the boys’ behaviour is arguably rowdy and insensitive”. I’d add “at times” to the end of that to more accurately reflect the whole interaction. In fact, the truth is that for *most* of the interaction the boys are admirably restrained, polite and patient.

I saw the entire long run video. The black Israelite provocateurs were throwing insults. The kids gathering for a bus on the steps grew.

What turned this into a spectacle was when the Covington Catholic students decided to start some chants of their own. Just like at CovCath basketball games. Chants that are lead by seniors who call themselves “Crazies” and whip the crowd into a frenzy so the opponent can’t inbound a ball, it make a free throw.

Let’s talk about the “Crazies” just for a moment.

In my high school, we had a similar group called “The Maniacs”. I went to a co-ed high school but the leaders were always three or four male senior students. I can imagine the leaders of the “Crazies” we’re also seniors, and in an all male school without cheerleaders, it is probably even a bigger deal.

According to the reports given, a teacher was asked if the students could do some of their own cheers to counter the black Israelites. Here is where the breakdown happens.

The adult thinking it would be a good idea to inject energy into the situation by riling up a group of students, many of which are wearing maga hats, in an area with native Americans protesting and black activists chanting insults was unbelievably poor judgement. The only group there under permit was the indigenous people.

The adult had to understand what the “Crazies” were going to do. To the students, this was just another basketball game. To the people they were responding to, this was a challenge. They don’t see school spirit. They see an escalation. So do the indigenous peoples.

Then one of the “Crazies” comes down the stairs, strips off his shirt, as I assume he’s done at games, but instead of invoking laughter, he pours more energy into the group, and does a “Haka”. The haka is a type of ancient Māori war dance traditionally used on the battlefield, as well as when groups came together in peace. Haka are a fierce display of a tribe’s pride, strength and unity.

This is culture appropriation. Maybe the students had never been called on this, or maybe they just thought it was cool, and it’s used by rugby players in New Zealand and it plays well on the basketball court. But it’s also very culture blind. This is a blind spot never pointed out by the school, which should be noted, the administration is 100% caucasian. To an indigenous people, this could be perceived as mocking.

This is when Phillips reacts. He sees a battle forming at HIS march and attempts to place himself into the crowd. He does not run into the group. He walks while beating a drum and chanting a medicine for peace. He’s joined by other indigenous people as a show of unity and support for their elder. Say what you will. Imagine you are one of that indigenous group. You can only imagine what this elder is thinking. He is grossly outnumbered. He is doing what his culture does.

Both the indigenous group and the Covington Catholic School were blind to each other’s culture. The black Israelite group stood back and continued to hurl insults. It was a tone deaf display from all.

Through the narrow lens of a camera various angles are captured none of them look good for any of the participants, depending on whose side you feel you are fighting on.

Instead of looking for blame, we should all step back. We should point that laser focus on ourselves and ask why we could not see what the other person was experiencing.

If this were a public school, I would expect this school to revisit its policy about field trips.

Wearing appropriate clothing, and notnto wear anything other than schools colors, and some basic safety guidelines for the students. What they are expected to do and how they should interact with others they may find in the space.

If these students were instructed to chant at the march, no problem. But it should have been made clear that after the march was over, they were not to disturb other people and their rights to protest. Even if counter-protests were vile. The adult chaperone should have been more considerate of other cultures and sensitive to the danger he could have been putting his students into, rather then let his boys loose.

Yes, that Haka dance used by the All Blacks is very famous with Kentucky school boys. Spot on, mate.

Cultural appropriation

GTFOOF.

Why didn’t the Indian elder take his drumming to the fellas who were abusing everyone? As you say, they were the one’s hurling insults, if that’s how you want to characterise racist and homophobic shouts. You stop to consider that as you were fabricating your specious story?

But it should have been made clear that after the march was over, they were not to disturb other people and their rights to protest.

You’re precious. Firstly, that’s not what happened. They didn’t go to others and disturb their protest. The Indians decided to move themselves to the teens. Secondly, that’s not how protests work. Ever. Each group often confronts the other. You hold a racist noble savage trope in your mind thinking Indians and other indigenous people are entitled to extra special reverence. They’re not. They are entitled to the same treatment as everyone else.

The contortions you twisted your mind into to craft this cockamamie narrative were amusing the read. Thanks for the laughs.

Don’t be deaf.
Don’t be a stooge. Your damage control has only damaged yourself.

@seeit: Thanks for your excellent analysis of the incident. It’s fair-minded and insightful.

@ga gamba: You’re grinding axes, as usual. I gather you like to think of yourself as an objective arbiter of the truth, but you’re one of the most ideologically unbalanced commenters on the site. You pretend to be calling out the motivated reasoning of others when, in fact, you’re only demonstrating your own.

@dellingdog Must disagree with you this time. What did ga gamba get wrong? Be more specific. Phillips subsequent description of the events is quite at odds with what the video shows. The student’s (quoted above) seems more consistent.

@hail: Seeit made an effort to be fair-minded, acknowledging that there were misunderstandings and unwise behavior on all sides of the incident (“Instead of looking for blame, we should all step back”). Ga gamba, in contrast, engages in mind-reading and ad hominem attacks (“your specious story,” “you’re precious,” “you hold a racist noble savage trope in your mind,” “contortions,” “cockamamie narrative,” “a stooge”) in order to advance his ideological take on the issue: the mainstream media got everything wrong because it’s engaged in an anti-white, anti-male P.C. crusade. This attitude is typical of the conspiracy-minded victim mongering which seems to motivate the majority of comments on the site. I’m simply registering my support for seeit’s more nuanced and open-minded approach.

I think you are trying to be fair. But it is hard not to push back against this pile-on isn’t it? You call @ga gamba out for “it’s engaged in an anti-white, anti-male P.C. crusade” but what if that is exactly the truth? I have tried hard not to believe that, but I am being forced by overwhelming evidence to believe that what ga gamba and others have said here is exactly correct. These kids did nothing wrong, *their* space was ‘invaded’, and the MAGA hat kid did nothing but stand his ground. Is that an offense? Must white people step off the sidewalk when a Victim approaches? Where does this stop? It is already leftist-SJW mainstream thinking that whites are born racist and there is no cure. What follows from that thinking?

The abusively racist and homophobic language used by the BHI had been going on for at least 72 minutes, as captured by the video.

He sees a battle forming at HIS march and attempts to place himself into the crowd.

Firstly, there was no battle forming. The BHI had been carrying on with its racist and homophobic words for a long while and no confrontational incidents occurred. The youth remained at a distance and jeered at times, which is a common occurrence during demonstrations. His march was across the street. Instead on placing himself between the two groups, say in the centre, he proceed past that point and gets right in the face of a student. He then beats his drum right in front of the student he targeted. He wasn’t a few feet away respecting the personal space of the student, he was a few centimetres away. He choose to intrude into the space of a child.

He does not run into the group.

No one said he did.

He walks while beating a drum and chanting a medicine for peace.

How does seeit360 know he was chanting a medicine for peace? Because the Indian says so? He’s already been exposed as a liar. Why do you take his words at face value? Because it’s a “medicine for peace” he’s allowed hold the drum beside the boy’s face at beat it? Did he ask to intrude the boy’s personal space? Is this is some type of religious rite? Would the boy be obliged show respect had it been a Scientologist, Moonie. Hari Krishna, or bible thumper behaving similarly with their sacred objects being banged before his face?

And what did the boy do that so outraged the progressives? He stood still and smiled. He failed to show deference to a ritual he didn’t ask for that was still intruded into his personal space because magic man may do whatever he wants.

Would we tolerate similar intrusions by others? Indeed not. People such as seeit360 not only allow such behaviour, they glorify it by assigning unproved mystical significance to an Indian banging on a drum. This ethnic magician is a subgroup of the nobel savage trope.

He’s joined by other indigenous people as a show of unity and support for their elder. Say what you will. Imagine you are one of that indigenous group. You can only imagine what this elder is thinking. He is grossly outnumbered. He is doing what his culture does.

He choose to walk into the group, choose to get into the face of a boy, was untouched and unharmed, and exited safely. No Purple Heart for our hero. I suspect that had others pulled the same nonsense, such as the boys getting into the faces of the BHI, the outcome would have been very different.

Some object to my calling this narrative a specious story. Specious is the appropriate word. It is misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive. Seeit360 seeks to frame this as a spiritual healer injecting himself to bring peace. This is nonsense. He was grandstanding.

Previously, I asked a straightforward question: Why didn’t the Indian elder take his drumming to the fellas who were abusing everyone? He likes to get up close and personal, yeah? Why not with the BHI?

No one can answer that question. They’re dodging it. Remember, this abuse by the BHI had been going on for at least 72 minutes – as captured on video – and perhaps longer. The Indians had been in the area since 9am. If anyone was in desperate need for healing beats and chants, it was the BHI.

I also asked why didn’t the Indians centre themselves between the two group if they, as
seeit360 imagines, were about to “battle”? They injected themselves right into the group of youths and no one gave them any grief. If you view the other videos, he was “surrounded” by people recording the event, to include Indians, BHI, students, and others. This is very common nowadays. Do something that attracts attention and you’ll likely be surrounded by others recording it.

It is a cockamamie narrative because it’s a contrivance.

Call my words ad hominem if you like, but they’re well deserved. Stooges need to be called out.

Yes. Absent that, perhaps life at hard labor might have been sufficient punishment, but when you add cultural appropriation and the fact that these Hitler Youth were at a (I can hardly even type the words …) Pro Life rally, it becomes clear that only execution will send a strong enough message to the colonists to drop to their faces when an indigenous approaches them.

Seriously? My teens are studying math/science and the other, arts, at a high performance public magnet school. They have no clue about Maki or cultural appropriations. Nor, do they want to. Along with their Muslim, Black and Jewish peers, they are focused on scholarships and GPA.

It’s one bright spot that many in this generation of teens are sick to death of the constant crises and emotional division. In fact, a few left wing adult teachers in the school tried to organize an SJW protest for something a while back. Out of 1900 students, 200 showed up and stayed only 10 minutes so they wouldn’t be late to class. Lol. I can imagine most of those kids responding the same way as thes3 boys. Except their cheers are different. Their sports teams are so horrible they have a cheer about their SAT scores to feel better about it.

I see hope. And you are part of the problem. Not the solution. I am a live and let live person. More of a classical liberal. I will stand with people I disagree with over free speech but I love truth. Every day truth including the sharing of angles of an incident like this. To censor all angles is as UNAmerican as one can get.

You really believe the Indian did not consciously decide to use the inexperience of the boys to create inciting footage? His report after the incident was after all a lie when you look at the other footage. Should the fact that this was a young group of boys and the blacks and indians were adults make a difference?

I think you raise a good point that approving the boys’ sports chanting was ill-advised. Of course they were within their rights to take up this action, but the adult wisdom among their chaperones was regrettably poor or absent at that time.

Overall, though, your attempt at a balanced viewpoint is questionable. You admonish:

“The adult chaperone should have been more considerate of other cultures and sensitive to the danger he could have been putting his students into…”

But you inexplicably defend:

“He is doing what his culture does.”

This bias undermines whatever even-handedness you think you are projecting here. Both the students and the indigenous protesters were blind to each others’ culture as you say, but which group gets a pass for being themselves?

So the kids have to hide their political allegiance because someone may disagree with it? Is that really what you meant by this “The adult thinking it would be a good idea to inject energy into the situation by riling up a group of students, many of which are wearing maga hats, in an area with native Americans protesting and black activists chanting insults was unbelievably poor judgement. The only group there under permit was the indigenous people. “? BTW the American Indians (I grew up on a reservation, that is what most of them prefer to use, they think Native American or Indigenous people is stupid, because anyone born in the US is native to America and Indigenous to it now) did not have a permit to protest there. Their permit was to protest across the street, hundreds of yards from where this took place. They moved their not the other way around. They chose to move to the kids, who never approached them, and never interacted with them before, they, the Indigenous protestors as your put it, left their approved area of protest and approached the kids at a PUBLIC space that no one had a permit to protest at.
And explain this piece of authoritarian nonsense “Wearing appropriate clothing, and notnto wear anything other than schools colors, and some basic safety guidelines for the students”. Are you literally saying kids have no free expression? That they must hide any of their own individuality because someone might be offended? Really? Is that what you are saying? I want you to answer me, because it just blows my mind that you think that is in any way the right approach.

The genocidal hate filled language of the black supremacists essentially mirrors the views of the leftists fascists who control the media.

Its not media that’s the problem. It’s the people that run the media, the editors specifically. Maybe, the editors themselves have to be targeted, doxxed, sued, etc.

These editors have lied through their teeth. They have incited violence towards all white people with their hate filled, lying narrative. Surely, consequences must follow.

They truly are the enemies of the people. These editors in many of these major mainstream publications people are the scum of the earth and people have to recognise that and go after them like they go after everyone else.

I’m not calling for action against the media. I’m calling for conservatives to fight back against the fascists who currently dominate the media, by using their own tactics against them.

People are so used to the leftist media monopoly, that they equate leftism with the media itself. But that’s not how it should be.

The leftist media class, who sit up on high, waving their hands and scoffing at the ( white ) people are the Marie Antionettes of our era.

I think all over the West, people are waking up to the true nature of out ‘media’ class. Seeing the yellow vest movement march on various media headquarters in France is hopefully the start of a wider revolution against this oppressor class.

“Leftist media monopoly”? If you’re so enraged by the “fascist” distortions of the mainstream media, why don’t you just watch Fox, read Breitbart, listen to Hannity, etc.? There are numerous alternatives available. I’m sure you can find some that reinforce your ideological biases instead of challenging your views.

@dellingdog My problem is that I’ve always been liberal and politically on the left. However, the reporting on Damore, Strumia, Jordan Peterson, Jian Gomeshi, #metoo and too many other subjects have been easy demonstrably false. Read what James Damore and Strumia wrote, read the transcript of Jian Gomeshi’s trial, and shiver how they differ from what was reported. Read the vicious attacks on Peterson in hundreds of magazines (enforced monogamy in the NYT!) and cry. I dislike Hannity, Breitbart and Fox and they are manipulative as well. Where does an old liberal I go to get the facts?

Quillette with its many reasonable commenters is a breath of fresh air.

Because this isn’t about the search for echo chambers for ourselves, this is about what ordinary people are taking to be honest news when it is anything but honest news. Even myself, when I see something on PBS I like to think it is at least factually honest even if the bias is predictably left. But what we see here is a moral panic based on gross and deliberate twisting of facts.

First off, I’m not saying the fascist left are liberal, so if you are a liberal, I’m not attacking you. So you don’t have to defend the fascist, racist liars who used innocent white teens as an opportunity to incite hatred towards white people collectively.

Inciting hatred towards white people is a common theme of the leftist media, which is why the term ‘fascist left’ Is absolutely accurate.

Look at the video, look at the narrative. It’s lies, lies hate, and more lies. They lie about everything. They incite hatred towards white people every single day. The divide and conquer. It’s not a one off, It’s consistent…drum beat like. Their war drum is their lies.

When one enters a court of law one promises to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Half the truth is a whole lie. As The event took place over approx. 90 minutes and covered an area of hundreds of yards by hundred s of yards and included hundreds of people, unless one analyses all video data, then any conclusions will be biased. The media jumped to conclusions without analysing all the data and then libelled the boys.

The Media and the Left are returning to the attitudes of the early Middle Ages. Perhaps we should return to the time when guilt was ascertained by forcing people into water: if they floated they were guilty. We laugh at the witch trials of the 17th century but are the modern media and left any different?

The Fascist were famous for using their preferred media to push their preferred narrative, so nothing ironic about it at all.
Also, is the media to sacrosanct that we can’t call it the enemy of the people? That sounds more like you are charging him with heresy, and you have appointed yourself the inquisitor. What is up with this sudden need to sanctify the media?

Thank you for posting that student’s statement. I do hope he becomes a journalist because clear, truthful, forthright expression is to be treasured. His parents must be so proud of him. On another matter: I was a proofreader for years, and yet Quillette articles frequently use terms I have never come across, so please help me here. What does it mean to be “doxxed”?

Your ‘well-known’ example is false. There was no threat of violence and no property damage*, just chants like ‘racist scumbag’ and ‘no borders, no walls” from roughly a dozen protestors. Don’t believe me? Here’s the video:

Here is what’s funny to me. It seems indisputable … utterly indisputable … that the original video was misleading. Even if investigation revealed that Covington secretly requires every student to make a white supremacist vow … the video was posted with the intent to mislead. Now millions of jackasses are trying to refute the correction by invoking the ideas created by the manipulation. In other words, the real narrative is “wrong” because I SAW that these guys are little racist monsters in the first video!

“Oh, it turns out the privileged white kids in MAGA hats might not have been 100% responsible for the incident. But, MAGA hats are a racist dog whistle so they are probably racist. Oh, and a small group of other people who were throwing mild insults at the white MAGA hatted conservatives, but that’s not important.”

America really is deeply troubled – when people hate the best among them while letting demons run amok. Imagine a conflict between a bunch of teenage christian boys, a grifter/activist playing fast and loose with the truth and an insane black supremacist sect – and then imagine an entire country turning against the Christian kids at the drop of a hat. No society can function when you’re punishing good people and rewarding bad. That’s a recipe for spectacular failure. Whether it’s denigrating traditional masculinity, or devaluing America’s culture and history, or hanging teenage Christian kids out to dry over a viral video clip.

When you watch the video and compare it to the social media reaction, one of the biggest things that get lost is how BIZARRE this whole sequence of events was. The Black Israelites are fringe weirdos, they basically insult the teenagers for an hour; when Phillips walks in, it would be pretty hard to tell why he was drumming and what his intentions were; the kids respond by clapping along, which is hard to define as “mocking” or “supportive” or “bemused,” but is likely some combination; Phillips leaves after a few minutes, and the Black Israelites go back to doing their thing.

The fact this sequence of people behaving in weird ways has to be recontextualized to fit some kind of narrative – in this case, “MAGA hat kid uses EVIL GLARE OF PRIVILEGE against tribal elder” – is itself a problem. I don’t think there’s a larger narrative here, a bigger takeaway from this sequence of awkward events. But the video provokes a reaction in people and they have to give it this kind of veneer. It’s so…strange, but human, and I think people should be thinking in larger terms of how to handle decontextualized video against the human need for creating narrative.

You nailed it with “awkward”. What to do in that situation? My narrative (Wink), based on Phillips’ activist history that has come out, is he saw an opportunity to exploit and took it. Approaching the teens, The “in your face” stance while beating his drum (with a comrade filming) and no talking was a definite provocation from an adult, no less. The “white boy enemy” didn’t respond as he hoped— is my guess. So the smile was positioned as evil. Thought policing at its finest!

An uncomfortable kid that is being taunted by what should be an adult and smiles to defuse the situation. He did nothing wrong, on the contrary. He acted as the only adult in the video. Would be proud if he had been my kid.

More a projection by you of what he and his cohort are likely to be in a decades time. In my country Catholic schools tend to be rather sedate – I suppose we do not have as many of the nutty fundamenatalist outpourings of the evangelicals that Catholics would copy activism from.

I had the same view re Kavanaugh.

It was not that I gave a dam about what he did or did not do at parties when young, but what his support for Trump (or attack style republicans with his work on the Bill Clinton witchhunt) might mean over time. I was happy for any reason to bar him, and probably anyone else Trump would choose (as he would choose for loyalty, not merit), from selection.

please tell me you are not being serious. If you are, you are by far one of the smallest minded, most judgmental bigots out there. You are the nutty fundamentalist, and the irony is you don’t even realize it.

Also: I think most of us are kind of exhausted by these stories and this kind of behavior. Everyone now feels it’s a great time to march about their identity group. All these people aren’t contributing anything but vitriol. Go make some art. Start a company. You don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. Don’t like someone or a group of people? Ignore them and go your own way. All this finger pointing and anger is useless and a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Hate the media? Don’t read it. People have been sucked into politics and it has paralyzed them.

“As white and wealthy Christian young men confronted by an ageing person of color, the schoolboys were placed at an immediate disadvantage on a number of identitiarian fronts,…”

What constitutes wealthy? I know many who went to private school on scholarship, grants, etc who were from poverty level families. They just crawled through glass to do whatever it took to keep their kids out of failing public schools. I have been involved with school choice initiatives for many years. People don’t have a clue.

From the ABC link:
“After videos spread online, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School issued a joint statement apologising to Mr Phillips and said they would take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion” against the students involved.”

Expulsion for priests for greater crimes with greater evidence would have been and would be nice.

On the bright side, the boys certainly received a valuable lesson, one that, unlike the classroom kind, they’ll never forget. They now have a strong taste of the hatred and dishonesty that rampages through the land.

And who knew about Black Hebrew Israelites? A friend of mine says he has seen them in NYC and they are very aggressive. Evidently they view themselves as the real Jews. Sounds like a cult. Btw, does no one work anymore?

The MSM jumped to a conclusion with this story that was quite simply wrong. Knowing where they stand these days on all things identity, it should come as no surprise where they came down. Ten years ago (or actually pre-Trump), this incident would not even have been noticed, but today… As everyone these days has to apologize for just about everything involving identity, I hope the trigger-finger MSM will do a very necessary mea culpa on this one.

There are times when I think the entire thing is a deception from within — the plan is for the leftist media to discredit itself, thus sending all of us into the arms of the waiting fascists. IOW, the supposed Left are really working for the … not the Right that we see, but rather for the globalist elite. The Right that we see are mere decoys.

I’m also concerned that might be the case. It’s almost as if the Left has been appropriated by the Right and serves as a foil to distract and divide with identity politics while our institutions and heritage are being carved up by the very rich.

With all of the threats/defamatory publicity, I wonder if the child who was the victim of this “shaming” can follow in the footsteps of Richard Jewell? All of them perhaps. MAGA hat could now be the new full-ride-scholoarship paid for by the fake-news media and all those Holier-than-thou-wood celebrities.

I would be quite amused if one of the conservative firms stepped up to represent them and started firing off suits against the likes of Milano, Oswald, CNN, etc. Those are some pretty deep pockets to go after Hulk Hogan style..

When one sees what happened here, it is difficult to miss the tie-in to Claas Relotius’s attack on the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota for Der Spiegel Magazine. In the minds of the media, there exists a cartoon of people who are not of their tribe and are not of the tribe of their readers. It is a cartoon that they themselves have created and are loathe to let go of.

It is not that they do not know it is a cartoon, rather it is that they prefer a cartoon world.

This was on NPR this morning as I was brushing my teeth. An interview with the native American guy. My thought when listening to it was that it provided no insight into what actually had happened. The interviewee was nonsensical and the interviewer David Green basically just put words in his mouth. I’m glad to have read this Quillette piece as I now feel like I have a decent understanding as to the actual events that took place. Sounds like two groups of protestors started shit with some conservative high school boys on a field trip, who then responded like relatively well-behaved high school boys under the circumstances. I am growing to hate the media, which is sad.

Certainly the behaviour of the school itself raises some questions. The kids were attending an anti-abortion rally. Why was this a school activity?

The answer might seem obvious – it’s a Catholic school and the Catholic Church opposes abortion. But do the kids get to opt out if they don’t agree with this stance?

And then there’s the school’s response to these allegations, which includes an investigation and threats of expulsion. Having dragged their students into political involvement via such a rally, are they now going to punish them if they apparently exhibit the “wrong” political attitudes, even if the alleged attitudes are reflective of the same side of politics that the Church avows and has prepared them for?

And there’s the behaviour of the teacher(s) in this incident, encouraging the kids to make a godawful public din in response to the Black Hebrew Israelites, instead of advising them to ignore the provocation.

In all of this the students themselves are the victims of various adult groups:

– The school, for the reasons outlined above.

– The Black Hebrew Israelites, a nasty right-wing cult notorious for their misogyny, homophobia and racism, which they commonly spew from street corners.

– The Native American activists, who decided to cynically exploit a group of schoolkids as an unwitting prop in the promotion of their cause, miscasting them as racist thugs in their online publicity.

– The left-wing and other social media commentators who were happy to use dubious reports as a basis for personal attacks on the kids, portraying them as “punchable” villains in a very shameful way.

– And above all, the news media, for spreading a very distorted version of events all over the internet without bothering to check alternative sources, and with no regard for the safety of the teenagers.

“are they now going to punish them if they apparently exhibit the “wrong” political attitudes, even if the alleged attitudes are reflective of the same side of politics that the Church avows and has prepared them for?”

I think it is very unlikely. If any of the boys have been shown to have misbehaved that is one thing, but politics does not come into it.

BHI is right-wing? How does one categorize them as right-wing? Please advise. I live in a deep red state. I avoid political discussion as most of the people around me are so entrenched in right-wing thinking that reasoned debate is impossible. That said, I don’t know a single person that would avow the teachings of this group.

It seems to me that BHI is an outlier; so bonkers, they’re outside the political spectrum.

I’m afraid I’m genuinely puzzled as to why you don’t identify those characteristics as “right-wing”.

Is the Right not commonly opposed to liberal principles such as racial and sexual equality, gay rights and secularism? Obviously the BHIs are much further to the right than mainstream conservatives, but if you believe I’ve wrongly positioned them on the political spectrum, you presumably live on another planet quite unlike this one.

If one looks at the categories “left” and “right” in the historical context of Western politics of the last several generations, regarding the issues listed – racial and sexual equality, gay rights, and keeping religion out of government, the law and education – those in favour of promoting such principles have largely been on the progressive or left side of politics, while those opposing such social and legislative change have largely been on the conservative or right side of politics.

This is a simple historical fact that wasn’t contested by either side of politics during those decades, and isn’t normally today, either. Conservative Christian politicians like Mike Pence are happy to identify with the right-wing side of the spectrum.

You were doing fine until you claimed there was a “paucity of evidence corroborating the Kavanaugh allegations”. Not only was considerable evidence presented showing that Kavanaugh’s pattern of behavior & moments were consistent with the accusations, he proved himself a pathological liar during his confirmation hearings, and there’s copious documentation of him perjuring himself before Congress a stunning 43 times.

Perhaps you would like to explain why the accuser publicly named four witnesses without having first contacted them to find out if they actually knew anything that supported her allegation.

While you’re at it, perhaps you can tell us why her attorneys allowed her to do it, and then apparently failed themselves to contact the witnesses. Or why Feinstein’s people apparently failed to contact them.

All four witnesses denied having knowledge relevant to the woman’s claims.

You seem to have forgotten that the alleged assault happened with no eyewitnesses, that Blakey-Ford told no one at the time, that two of these four were the alleged attackers, and the third one of their buddies.

You seem to have forgotten that Bart’s own creepy calendar notes a party with all these persons in attendance, on or about the time Blasey-Ford places it, a time corroborated by Mark Judge’s memoir.

Now, perhaps you would like to explain why BK approached several of his former Yale classmates in an attempt to influence their potential testimony about his dick-wagging stunt, which was recalled by many Yale alumni and discussed widely just prior to BK’s confirmation hearings. Perhaps you would like to explain how BK knew to contact his former classmates about this accusation, when he swore under oath that the first time he’d ever heard of it was when reading it in the New Yorker article appearing two weeks later.

Actually, if there was evidence of Kavanaugh” dick waving, why did the original paper retract ithe story forlack of evidence? Please provide some link or at least reference to him calling his Yale classmates and everyone knowing about it. Because this would be news to the editor who ordered the story retracted for lack of evidence.
And from what I read Kavanaugh’s”creepy” calendar notes contradicted her timeline.
So basically everything you just said is not even remotely true.

Perjury is a felony. Why is he not in jail then? Can you provide a link to these 43 felonies? I myself noticed not one single shred of anything but circumstantial evidence of his guilt at the hearings. That one’s pattern of behavior might be consistent in the minds of one’s enemies with being a rapist, is not evidence that one is actually a rapist.

But that’s my point, there was no *direct* evidence apart from Ford. Circumstantial evidence is not direct, it is stuff like:

-Brett was known to drink.
-Brett was in the country at the time.
-Ford was in the country at the time.
-Brett is a confessed heterosexual.
-Brett and Ford may have met on at least one occasion.

This is circumstantial ‘evidence’ and it proves nothing, what it can be used for is to disprove an alibi, for example, were K to have claimed to be out of the country (which he didn’t) point two above could be used to prove that he was in the country. IOW circumstantial evidence ‘proves’ that the accused cannot be exonerated — it is not impossible that he could be guilty.

No, an honest mistake like that is too trivial to mention, and the accuracy of your recollection is no reflection on BK in any way. This is pretty basic logic.

“the GOP-led Senate wanted him bad.”

But surely many of these perjuries occurred under Dem-led majorities? And isn’t it up to the DOJ to pursue perjurers regardless of party? Here’s a a supposed example:

LIE 13
Kavanaugh claimed in his opening statement on September 27, “I spent most of my time in high school focused on academics, sports, church, and service.”
TRUTH
As Kavanaugh’s own calendar indicated, there were a lot of parties and gatherings. As the Washington Post noted, “But it does have one interesting entry: “Go to Timmy’s for Ski’s.” That’s a slang term for “brewskis” = beer, and he includes other friends who Ford alleges were at the party — or in the room, in the case of Mark Judge — when the incident occurred.”

So it is perjury to claim that one studied hard if one also partied hard? How many parties might he attend without being a perjurer would you say? It’s a bit subjective, isn’t it? And subjective judgements cannot be called perjury. Nor can various efforts at political spin.

Or at least the exaggerations and evasions and demi-lies that almost everyone involved in politics engages in all the time, no? Apart from the fact that you appear not to support BKs views, is he really more pathological than the next politician? Is he as big a liar as Feinstein even? As for me, I can think of several reasons why I don’t like BK. For a start, he worked for GWB which makes him an accessory to crime in my view. And he was part of the witch hunt against Clinton which was politics at it’s worst — maybe even worse than the attempted assassination of BK himself! See, it’s not that I support the guy, I just think we should make more sober attacks on him and avoid hysterical exaggerations.

Since you asked, I don’t like pathological liars or narcissists, and BK is both, and yes, more so than even most politicians. Of course, judges ideally aren’t supposed to be political, which BK was far more than most other judges.

BK was not a good example for this post. Whereas Sandemann was largely vindicated upon revelation of further evidence, BK’s lies were only confirmed by new information, with yet more lies exposed.

Come on, now. We’re going to pretend like young white guys with MAGA hats haven’t developed a bit of a reputation? Yes, the story has been badly distorted, but it should be concerning that almost nobody had a hard time believing that the pro-Trump people were behaving disrespectfully and arrogantly. You reap what you sow.

Please provide evidence that the reputation is well deserved. The reason they have a bad reputation is because of things exactly like this story. It has become a pattern. Protestors block Trump supporters from attending a rally, Trump supporters respond, media blames Trump supporters. Trump supporter attacked, Trump supporter responds, Trump supporter blamed. Random white guy does something bad, media immediately labels him a Trump supporter, further research demonstrates he is either apolitical or left leaning. Swastikas and death threats called into black churches, Trump supporters blamed, turns out it was a parishioner, who is black himself. Hate mail and threats sent against Synagogues, Trump supporters blamed, turns out it was a Israeli Jew. I could continue, but these are all real events. I want more than one or two random examples of a young white guy in a MAGA hat actually starting something without provocation. Provide evidence that their reputation is well deserved.

You have the answer within your own comment. “it should be concerning that almost nobody had a hard time believing that the pro-Trump people were behaving disrespectfully and arrogantly.” “Yes, the story has been badly distorted,” I would imagine there is a correlation between those two statements and “We’re going to pretend like young white guys with MAGA hats haven’t developed a bit of a reputation?” Is that reputation entirely deserved or a result of badly distorted media coverage such as we’re seeing now? I can find videos of MAGA hat wearing people being violently attacked within seconds but I am hard pressed to find the reverse. And by that logic I should be able to judge and dismiss young black males with low hanging pants because of high crime statistics caused by similar looking people. After all, they reap what they sow.

If that’s the case I can only imagine the fate that the natives and black nationalists deserve, to say nothing of the frothing twitter fools and gullible “yes me too” journalists…reap what you sow indeed. Civil War is a state of mind and you are saying and doing all the right things to get there.

Are you saying we can fairly demonize any group that has “developed a bit of a reputation”? Are you saying that if a certain claim fits the preconceived narrative, we are right to denigrate a person or group of people?

Are these left-leaning ideas, right-leaning beliefs, or just your personal beliefs?

The longer video in question shows actual behavior from actual people. We can discuss this. Let’s not waste time discussing “probable” behavior from people we’ve decided we can’t possibly sympathize with. That’s how propaganda works, and your statement above proves you’re a ripe sucker for it.

I think the point here is that you can chide the teenagers for a molehill of “poor judgment,” but only after you climb over a mountain of outright reprehensible and dishonest behavior from the other (adult) actors in this confrontation.

Furthermore, this is, to me, is a non-issue. If you go to a rally and expect not to be confronted for your ideas, you’re a fool. Nobody was hurt, arrested, or violated. No property was defaced. Some people yelled mean things at each other, sneered at each other, and then they all went home. Sounds like everything went just as usually to me. I would expect no less from a protest. It’s the bat-shit reactions and forced (dishonest) narratives that happened afterwards that are the actual story.

@Nakatomi Plaza, So would you say the same about young African American men wearing hoodies? I teach all African American students. If I take them out on a field trip, and they dared to smile at a Native American drummer who drummed in their faces, I guess they’d deserve the media attacking them, threatening them with death, and so on, because, after all, “we’re going to pretend young black guys with hoodies haven’t developed a bit of a reputation? Yes, the story might be badly distorted, but, well, you reap what you sow.”

Would you say that? If you did, I’d condemn you as a despicable racist.

Come on, now. We’re going to pretend like young black guys haven’t developed a bit of a reputation? Yes, they probably were not fully deserving of a lynching for that particular crime, but they were uppity. If they hadn’t been uppity to their betters they would have been fine.

Oh hey, there’s gonna be a whole new round of bullshit because there’s a 7-second video from some young girl where maybe some of the boys yelled stuff like “MAGA” at her. Oh but don’t worry, sites like The Gateway Pundit already found some of her offensive tweets. You may notice none of this has anything to do with the initial video anymore beyond “high schoolers good or bad.”

There’s no reason for any of this to be a national story. We need to figure out how to break this process.

I only hear about this stuff through articles like this. I’m not on twitter. My kids (17 and 12) think twitter is a joke, for old people (they just use peer-to-peer via discord or suchlike). To them its just a source of amusing memes. To me, it is something I hear about 2nd or 3rd hand.

Why are all you people on f…ng twitter? You can’t get mob-bullied by invisible people with no voices. Seems to me that those dying to be “relevant”, in the loop, known, heard, listened to, 5 minutes of fame and all that, are the ones on twitter, and the ones getting burned. Walking your dog by the sea, twitter doesn’t exist.

I have a sincere hope that in five to ten years, people will react to Twitter users the same way most people nowadays react to smokers – “You still do that?!? Even while knowing all the harm it does to your life and those you love??”

This is all helped along by the media, partly from their writers sharing in the temporary “high” of self-righteous tribal violence, and partly because the media owners are desperate to feed the mob whatever will bring their media more “hits”, since most of the available advertising revenue is now sucked up by Google and Facebook.

It looks as if CNN has done some belated investigating and determined this video and story was being actively promoted by an unknown foreign source:

“Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats.

The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found.

Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher who saw the tweet and shared it herself on Saturday, said she later realized that a network of anonymous accounts were working to amplify the video.”

Max has done what countless other caucasians do. He had given the young men a pass, not unlike the people who gave Kavanaugh a pass, ignoring their behavior. He lessens their actions and presents a narrative that is all about being a victim in a situation you create for yourself. Sad…and shameful. I just hope the students learn a valuable life lesson and perhaps learning about respect for native Americans is a start. If they had been properly educated, they would have reacted to the wise old man in a different way. They were disrespectful, and that is a fact!

Steven,
That is an utterly partisan and delusional interpretation of the video which depends, ipso facto, on denying the humanity of the kids in question. You have become the colonial officer shooting into the crowd of protesting Sikhs in Amristar for the sake of the authority of the Empire, although in your case it is an Empire of Ideology and Progressivism. How many people are you willing to see as less than human to achieve your goals? How many must be crushed for you to be satisfied? Many it seems. The comment on Kavanaugh is a hell of a tell, why are you so willing to believe a middle aged leftist teaching at a leftist college who discovers a found memory of sexual assault at the most convenient of times to derail a supreme court nominee. Honestly you are like the people who were duped by Nazi propaganda reals of concentration camps or like Jean Paul Sartre in the Soviet Union, seeing what he wanted to see and blocking out what he could. Lose the blinders man. Regain your humanity while you can!

This story may focus on the deceptive nature of our oligarch-owned media, but the real story is that once again religion is found in the midst of hatred, confusion and division. It is also a story about how the youth of today think their uniformed opinions are meaningful and warranted, and their behavior should be unfettered by dignity, compassion and respect. Allowing the state and commercial entertainment to raise our children in a lethal mistake. Men need to step up and take control of their children, establishing respect and compassion. And the religious among us need to release their children from the shackles of fairy tales, and inculcate morality with real world secular discipline and love, rather than the terrorist threat of eternal torture and damnation for being born.

The cyber-jackals fed very well on this one. There’s nothing like an online lynching to make your day. And their mind reading skills are phenomenal; just one look at the face of a nervous teenager and they can tell you virtually everything about him. How do they acquire these amazing skills of perception? I guess I’m just an old fashioned white guy who looks at everybody else as an individual, instead of a skin color or a gender or a whatever. And to really date myself, I actually believe in defending your right to say things I completely disagree with.

Wearing a MAGA hat is in itself an act of racism and fear-mongering. Trump’s whole brand is built on Mexican rapists and murderers coming to kill us. And the fact that these boys, who, when they’re not demonstrating, are dreaming of getting laid, the very act that gets girls pregnant, are at an anti-choice rally puts them in the town square, ready for a fight. So spare me that these poor kids have suffered Social Media bullying.

@Bruce,
I hope you are being sarcastic. If not, please know that many, many legal immigrants (such as myself) support Mr. Trump’s efforts to curb illegal immigration. He said SOME Mexicans are rapists and murderers, which is true- unless you think minorities are perfectly angelic beings?
I am pro-choice but respect these teens’ right to assemble. Everyone dreams about getting laid- how do you know these teens are not using contraception? That was a really stupid argument against their pro-life stand.

Internet media is designed to maximize divisiveness for monetary gain. Companies have built online entities that encourage anonymous anger, outrage, and mindless virtued echoing (some of the worst qualities in mankind) with a dishonest veneer of “community” to benefit their bottom lines.

Our elected officials are complicit, ignorant, and/or negligent in this deceit. People need to start having public discourse about this topic.

Get off social media. Stop going to your favorite clickbait “news sites” and reinforcing your ideological worldview. It’s a calculatedly addictive and destructive tool built to perpetuate itself while the people using it divide into tribes bent on destroying each other. This is 100% by design. Thousands of the worlds best engineers designed these things. I have a hard time believing any of the results are by accident.

Try using your real name when and if you leave a comment somewhere. See if you still say the same things or if you begin to temper your views with a little more thought and empathy before you hit send. See if you still call that guy or gal you disagree with a dumbfuck, or POS.

We need to find things to unite around or we’re going to self destruct and no one will be able to claim innocence. Try family. Friends. Faith. Community. Country. Accomplishment. Success. Charity.

Maybe I’m wrong and this weeks fever pitch of MSM blunders and the chorus of easily influenced drones lining up to assault school kids and impeach politicians over easily refutable evidence is making it seem the process is hitting 4th gear.

@bubblecar. Do you feel the same about the family, friends, faith…in your own life? Like they’re tools used with ill intent? I rattled off that quick list because those are all things that are extremely personal and positive in my own life. They enrich it and none at the expense of others. Most to the benefit.

Using your own name online isn’t that scary if you’re addressing other people how you might in person. Why would someone attack you if you’re courteous? What could be used against you at your job and in your community if you are civil? Anonymity online is NOT bringing about your best interpersonal communication efforts. Quite the opposite. My own experience is that the things I comment while anonymous are different (and not in a good way) than the things I say in person. I noticed and corrected that behavior by effectively putting a name and face to what I say. It’s not for everybody, but it’s been helpful to me in remaining decent in the presence I keep online (which is growing smaller and smaller)

As an exercise try writing comments and when you are ready to submit, attach your own name. See if you’d change anything before sending.

Also, you can take or leave unsolicited advice from strangers on the internet. The same goes for trolls…if you don’t feed them they starve to death or move on to more responsive targets.

I enjoy reading the comments here, but sometimes cringe at how easily an enlightening thread is thrown off the rails by an obvious troll.

It is more about having to prove that they knowingly lied and did so with malice. It is just as much about the accused (ironically) having the presumption of innocence. If this were to go to court, the burden of proof is always on the plantiffs. There are no criminal charges for libel. And as much as I despise the media, I think it would be worse to give the state the ability to imprison people because ‘they lied’ (which I by they did here). We look at Europe’s libelaws and hate crime laws and are aghast at how they have given up personal liberty for the ambiguous protection of the state.

The First Amendment restrains the federal and state governments from (as relevant here) restricting speech. But it’s not an iron-clad restraint.

As far as telling lies is concerned, it depends. The government may not punish anyone for telling lies about the Covington students – UNLESS, for example – the government were to be investigating possible criminal actions related to the incident.

Tell a lie to a law enforcement officer in that case, and the First Amendment will not offer protection from prosecution.

The First Amendment does not apply when private property owners, privately held organizations or employers restrict speech. (Except in certain cases when private entities receive public funds.)

When a private citizen tells lies, he or she may be sued civilly for damages by other private citizens if the lie results in malicious harm to another.

The original, primary purpose of the First Amendment (as relevant here) was to prevent the government from closing down newspapers and tossing the editors into jail if the government disliked what was being printed.

The First Amendment prevented Barak Obama from shutting down Fox News. He may not have wanted to, but if he had wanted to, the First Amendment would have prevented it.

(There is SO much more to this, but time, space (and the continuum thereof) is limited.)

Even if the worst possible version of events was true (and it wasn’t) IT WAS CHILDREN!!!!!!Grownups attacked children in social media! With no shame.
The internet is a wonderful thing, Email is fantastic, smart phones and tablets are great inventions. But Twitter, Facebook , Instagram, and the like are horrible destructive inventions.

The NYT accurately described this incident. The third group that was yelling racist and abusive language was a fringe and belligerent Black Hebrew Israelite. There is ample evidence that Mr. Philips of the Native American group was not demonstration, but playing Native music on a drum. He tried to intervene to help defuse the situation.

Being new to the Quillette group, I am very disappointed by the one-sided description of the incident that vilifies Mr. Phillips a present the students as angelic Catholics. They were in fact there to protest abortion have been carted down to Washington by a Catholic School (any problem with religion in politics here?). However, whatever is really appalling is the gads of quasi-intellectuals who are writing on this site fascist followers and doing what I thought Quiellette was concerned about, ie,. being objective, not dividing our country by left and right and refraining from presenting extreme views.

So I am out of here. Quillette, remove me from your last – you are not what you seen and only a voice for neo-nazis.

They were in fact there to protest abortion have been carted down to Washington by a Catholic School (any problem with religion in politics here?)

I have no problem with that. Disclaimer: I am not a churchgoer, and my family background is Protestant. I have no problem with the religious roots of antislavery movement in United States, Do you? I had no problem with the Reverend Martin Luther King’s participation in the movements for desegregation and civil rights. Do you?

However, whatever is really appalling is the gads of quasi-intellectuals who are writing on this site fascist followers ..
Speaking about yourself? 🙂

“They were in fact there to protest abortion have been carted down to Washington by a Catholic School (any problem with religion in politics here?). ”

Since the US Constitution explicitly enunciates the Rights to Freedom of Religion and the Freedom of Assembly, why the hell would anybody have a problem with it? You should really read and understand the US Constitution.

And of course, the Black Hebrew Israelites were also exercising those same Rights. The Native American group was exercising the Right to Assembly and perhaps the Right to Freedom of Religion, depending on what they considered their activities Religious.

“and only a voice for neo-nazis.”

That’s just a lazy insult. There are no “neo-nazis” here and no support for Nazis either. If you can’t accurately describe your opponent, it’s a strong indication that you don’t actually understand their arguments.

This incident is no accident. When you repeat the same lie over and over and over again on the front page, the factual corrections that appear in tiny print days later on page 23 never penetrate or explode the initial lie.

Look how the media have lied continuously about Trump/Russia, Trump/Racist, Trump/Hitler for the last 3 years.

Difficult for even the most reasonable non-partisan person to judge someone fairly in those circumstances.

Think it’s an accident that white Catholics were targeted in this particular incident? Maybe. But who’s on death’s door right now, and who has been touted as a likely replacement? Oh yeah, a white Catholic female.

There is too much invested in the narrative now for it to be allowed to be disputed or broken. Trump IS Hitler. Trump DID sell out to Putin. He IS illegitimate. He MUST be – the narrative cannot be wrong. Expect lots more fake news as Mueller’s “investigation” comes to a head over the next few weeks. What will happen when AG Barr reports that the “investigation” is over and no further charges laid? Which is SOP for the DOJ in such circumstances. No release of the Report. Nada.

Cue the leaks of the scandalous things that were supposedly done, the suspicious going-ons (that will be hyped-up as something BIG), blah, blah, blah. The haters will go right on believing in Russia, Russia because thats all they have, and they even believe it now. They HAVE to – it’s decreed. Laid down by the Elders as the gospel.

So how can anyone in their right mind even try thinking about making a deal with Hitler, who eats babies, murders blacks and hispanics, and, to top it off, who sold us out to Russia? I mean, REALLY! You can’t negotiate with someone like THAT!!!!

Are there any decent people left in the US? Or have they all been turned into puppet sheep? We’ll see in 2020.

Well said. The additional problem we are seeing develop are the online lynch mobs who begin a vile parade of horrific threat of injury, doxxing, and death. There needs to be some structure to dissuade this dog pile of viciousness. I believe every one who threatened injury or death to these kids needs to pay collectively as a mob for what they’ve said. In fact, every time a pile on of this nature rips through the internet, they should be treated as any mob doing damage in the material world. The damage done to these kids won’t be felt for a few years, yet, but the damage has been done.

Once upon a time in the Lisbon of 1506 a miracle was witnessed in a church, the face of Christ was Shining. One guy made an observation that the phenomenon could be easily explained by the sun rays hitting the image on the face. Well ….5000 dead Jews later peace was restored to the city. The Skeptic was a “new Christian”, which for the parties concern was a Jew, and Jews were heretic and good Christians had to defend the faith and the miracles of Christ. So 5000 Jews were slaughtered. That’s an example of moral panic.

Your latest argument is such a stretch that I am frankly surprised that you didn’t dislocate your shoulder.

The article talks about disfavored identities, but it is clear that at Quillette, Native Americans are a disfavored identity. Just look at your name-calling: “Standing With Smiles, Spreading Bull and Dances with Drums.” And you and peter kriens repeatedly use the term ‘Indians’–which actually refers to citizens of India–to describe the participants in the Indigenous Peoples March. To use correct terminology, West Indians are citizens of the West Indies, and American Indians [or Amerindians] live in N. and S. America.

Bottom line: Not using a group’s preferred name when referring to them is a subtle but very real form of contempt. Instead of calling out the BHI for showing contempt to the HS students, why don’t you clean up your own act?

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Greg Ellis reads The Psychology of Progressive Hostility, Matthew Blackwell’s essay about why progressives are more hostile than conservatives when their beliefs are challenged. It was published in Quillette...